The Brutalist does not open with its eponymous architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody). Instead, the movie’s first and final moments are with Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), Tóth’s young niece.
In the film’s overture, Zsófia faces the camera while being badgered by a Hungarian border officer who concludes his spiel with the question that more or less animates the entire film: “What is your true home? Help us to help you get home.” And in the epilogue, Zsófia (now an adult played by Ariane Labed) once again occupies the center of attention as she stands at the podium for a gala honoring the fabulous career of her uncle at the Israeli pavilion in the first Venice Biennale of Architecture in 1980. Zsófia, having since emigrated from Hungary to the U.S. to Israel, looks to the camera once more, but this time she speaks:
Uncle, you and Aunt Erzsébet once spoke for me, I speak for you now, and I am honored. “Don’t let anyone fool you, Zsófia,” he would say to me as a struggling young mother during our first years in Jerusalem, “no matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey.”
Between these two moments unfolds a 215-minute arc in which Zsófia appears as ostensibly a minor character, entirely mute except for one critical scene late in the film in which she breaks her silence, announcing that she and her husband plan to move to Israel. The movie instead coheres around László and his travails between New York and Pennsylvania. László’s toil, after being chewed up and spit out by his cousin’s shiksa wife in Philly, is to serve as the pet architect of local industrialist Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce), entranced by this accomplished practitioner of the Bauhaus movement who has appeared in his midst.
At the Van Buren mansion in Doylestown, when the patron solicits his sponsee for something like an artistic credo, Tóth muses that despite his imprisonment, and despite the Nazis, his buildings in Hungary endure, retaining their capacity to provoke:
When the terrible recollections of what happened in Europe have ceased to humiliate us, I expect them to serve instead as a political stimulus, sparking the upheavals that so frequently occur in the cycles of peoplehood.
Cycles, indeed. As of 2024, there is no doubt that the largest collection of Bauhaus buildings in a single city in the world is located in Tel Aviv, Israel, earning it the travel book moniker, “The White City.” A white hot center of this modernist explosion, which coincided with the immigration of European Jewish architects to Israel in the 1930s, is the neighborhood of Neve Tzedek. Red-roofed, alley-lined, gallery-filled, and located across the street from the beach, Neve Tzedek is also adjacent to the site of the former Palestinian neighborhood al-Manshiyya.
Within the vast scope of The Brutalist, it is difficult to locate the meaning of Zionism, Israel, and the decision of characters to trade in the depicted cruelties of immigration in the United States for the off-screen barbarism of the new Israeli state. In the first act of The Brutalist, titled “The Enigma of Arrival,” the audience hears a radio speech delivered by David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, after the November 1947 vote by the United Nations to partition British Mandate Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. Sparks fly before us as Ben Gurion sounds out the joys of imminent Jewish statehood and as László makes a gorgeous Bauhaus-style chair for his cousin’s furniture store, his first gig upon arrival from Europe.
In April 1948, at the time Ben Gurion declared Israeli independence at a building in downtown Tel Aviv, Manshiyya resembled other Palestinian communities in the city of Jaffa—the then-Arab metropolis just meters away from Neve Tzedek. Manshiyya had an estimated 13,000 residents, who, within days of the Israeli declaration, were uprooted by Israeli forces who expropriated their land.
“Some of Manshiyya’s inhabitants were expelled to Jordan, and others were sent by sea to Gaza and Egypt,” notes the Israeli NGO Zochrot, which documents the systematic theft of Palestinian land in 1948 by the new Israeli state, an event known to Palestinians as the nakba (which means “catastrophe”). This organized destruction of Palestinian land, which was then resettled in Manshiyya and elsewhere with Jews, was not the byproduct of a few rowdy Israelis during wartime. It was organized by Ben Gurion himself—among many others— but remains denied as a matter of Israeli state policy. This occurred throughout the entire country.
No Palestinian, of the hundreds of thousands displaced in 1948, has since been allowed home. It is not difficult to imagine that someone, perhaps from Manshiyya and pushed to Gaza in 1948, has since been killed by the ongoing Israeli slaughter of the largest remaining concentration of Palestinians in the world. Perhaps in their memories of their homes, they remember when Zionist settlers built some of those Bauhaus structures.
In the final, non-epilogic moment we have with László, he is bent over his wife’s side at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York. Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) is Jewish by conversion, suffering from osteoporosis, and, in this moment, recovering from an overdose of heroin accidentally administered by her husband in an attempt to ease her pain. “This whole country is rotten,” she whispers to László. “I’m going to Israel to be with Zsófia and her child…. Come home with me.” “I will follow you until I die,” he replies. We never definitively find out if that’s so. The bread crumbs lead in multiple directions, making it impossible to pin down where László actually ends up. The works on display at the Biennale are constructed entirely in America. But László promised that he and Erzsébet “would never be apart again.” The finale takes place at the Israeli pavilion, and when Zsófia mentions “our first years” in Israel, the context leaves it unclear whether this includes László, or simply her husband and newborn child.
László, Erzsébet, and Zsófia—three survivors of the camps—endure all manner of abuse in their struggle to build lives after the Holocaust. They are sexually preyed upon, exploited for artistic talent their sponsors do not possess, and casually dispossessed all over again, when fate frowns, a shipment of concrete is derailed, and capital dries up. As represented in the film, Israel is a home to which these Jews return after suffering both the Holocaust and the false salvation of America. Zsófia only speaks before the audience once she has made a commitment to immigrate there, and Erzsébeth has a near-death experience before deciding on aliyah (the Hebrew word for immigrating to Israel), but it is left indeterminate what László does. We see him next as an old man in 1980 in the epilogue, where Zsófia recalls his insistence to her, in her early days in Jerusalem, that it’s about the destination and not the journey.
At the screening of the film I attended, Corbet and co-writer Mona Fastvold sat afterward for a brief Q&A. The discussion was moderated by the film critic Dana Stevens, who observed to the filmmakers that the ending was “ambiguous,” marking something like a quarter-century “ellipsis” between the end of Act II (“The White Core of Beauty”) and the epilogue.
Corbet’s response insisted on the power of ambiguity, offering his film up as a tableau for arguments on the way home between people who came together to see it. Totally reasonable! Even admirable, not wanting to give the audience any simple, fixed idea of What It All Means, despite the semblance of a tidy explanation in Zsófia’s final speech.
But the double-edge of ambiguity is omission, a difficult sin for a work of art so loaded with history and its actual meanings, only some of which the movie cares to explain. “Nothing can be of its own explanation,” László declares to Van Buren. I couldn’t agree more. In Childhood of a Leader (2015), Corbet and Fastvold give an epic edge to the prepubescent tantrums of a bastard son, casting his cuckold father as a negotiator of the doomed Treaty of Versailles and thereby linking cursed inheritances of paternity and patria, as the son will grow up to become a military dictator. Their follow-up, Vox Lux (2018), is a similarly sophisticated and cyclically obsessed film, in which a school shooting serves as the prelude to the rise of an American pop star who struggles with the celebrity’s crown of thorns that she has worn since that bloody day in her youth. Cause and effect, cause and effect.
Whatever power The Brutalist summons in its rags-to-perhaps-Zionism story is blunted by the unwillingness of its story to actually end where it leads. The film freely depicts the destruction of heroin addiction, the hidden cost of creative patronage, and how love is sustenance and wounds either heal or fester with time. But with Zionism, Corbet and Fastvold prove unable to even intimate the horrible truth to which it amounts: that the victims of the Nazi Holocaust, and even those further subject to American abuses of capitalist exploitation might be capable of perpetrating the same crimes against someone else.
