I watched The Brutalist yesterday. My reaction? An implausible story poorly told and awkwardly stitched together; the Holocaust connection seemed gratuitous; a ham-handedly written script, the audience actually snickered at some of more pompous utterances of the Guy Pearce character; distracting bursts of portentous music at odd moments; and glitches, like Tóth saying square meters when he knows his audience understands only square feet, or producing the kind of expressionistic sketches that are out of character for a Bauhaus-trained architect—more like something the great Eric Mendelsohn would draw. As for the title, while Tóth was definitely brutalized, it made no sense to me, but then not much in this second-rate production did.
My grumpy reaction may have been colored by the greasy smell of my neighbor’s popcorn—a reminded of why I stopped going to the cinema a decade ago.
Architecture? The stunning library that Tóth builds for Van Buren does seem like the sort of thing that a talented Bauhausler might design on coming to America, unlike the monumental “community center” that sits uneasily at the center of the film. In 1948 Marcel Breuer, an actual Hungarian immigrant Bauhaus architect, built a modernist house in the MoMA garden (above). The design, a thoughtful combination of wood, stone and glass—not Brutalist at all—was acquired by an American millionaire, a Rockefeller not a Van Buren.