The Brutalist: What this Oscar contender really says about the American Dream and Israel
Editor's note: The following piece includes spoilers for the plot of The Brutalist
When Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist premiered at the Venice film festival last September, few film experts believed it could have any impact on the erratic US box office.
A nearly four-hour-long immigrant drama about a Jewish architect taking refuge in 1940s Philadelphia, nothing about The Brutalist, including its cast, screamed box office gold.
Four months later, the film has oddly become the hottest ticket on the American east and west coasts.
Of the numerous awards contenders released during the current season, Brady Corbet’s Golden Globe winner and multiple Oscar nominee has been the most difficult securing tickets for, especially for its 70mm film presentations – a rare feat for independent films in the post-Covid era.
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Still in limited release, The Brutalist has been consistently selling out at a rate this writer has not witnessed in a while.
It’s difficult to pin down the reasons for the surprise success of Corbet’s third feature.
Some credit its enveloping long-form storytelling; others believe its take on the myth of the American dream struck a chord with disenchanted liberal audiences yet to come to terms with returning Trumpism.
Coming to America
For Israeli critics, the virtues of Corbet’s passion project were brushed aside, replaced with solitary emphasis on the role of the Jewish state in the film’s narrative.
Accusations that the film endorses a Zionist message and Corbet’s reluctance to explicitly comment on the subject highlight the shrinking space for ambiguity in art.
The celebrated opening scene of The Brutalist sets the tone for the rest of the film: an unseen figure is jockeyed amongst a crowd into the bright front of a moving ship stepping into Ellis Island as an inverted Statue of Liberty suddenly emerges.
Daniel Blumberg’s pounding, brassy score reaches an extravagant crescendo, imbuing the bewildering yet transfixing image with seething irony.
Oscar-winner Adrien Brody is Laszlo Toth, the titular Hungarian architect fleeing concentration camps to the embracing bosom of post-war America in 1947.
#TheBrutalist has received 10 Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director for Brady Corbet, Best Actor for @adrienbrody, Best Supporting Actress for Felicity Jones and Best Supporting Actor for Guy Pearce! pic.twitter.com/H1nze7dYyB
— The Brutalist (@thebrutalistmov) January 23, 2025
Traumatised by the horrors he experienced at the Buchenwald concentration camp, details of which are never revealed, Laszlo’s aspirations are no different from millions of other immigrants seeking to fulfil their frustrated dreams in the land of opportunity.
The protagonist is initially welcomed by his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), the owner of a small architect shop in Philadelphia whose laborious efforts to assimilate have resulted in a marriage to a Christian woman and his conversion to Catholicism.
From the get-go, Corbet emphasises the role Christianity played in forging the American character, by turns as an agency of control and as a means for integration.
While the headstrong Laszlo doesn’t want to follow his cousin’s footsteps, he acknowledges that Christianity is a force to be reckoned with, one deeply entrenched in the domineering and unconquerable capitalist system.
Laszlo appears to be hitting the ground running when Harry Lee (Joe Alwyn), the son of a wealthy industrialist, commissions the cousins to build a library in his family mansion.
Things do not turn out as well as initially hoped, and Harry Lee’s father, Mr Van Buren (Guy Pearce) pugnaciously dismisses Laszlo’s work, which his son had commissioned behind his back.
As a result, the pair end up being denied their payment, and to add salt to injury, Attila’s wife kicks him out, falsely accusing him of making sexual advances towards her.
With his wife Erzsebet (Felicity Jones) still trapped in Budapest with their niece Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy), Laszlo strives to carve out a new life for himself in a society nowhere that is nowhere near as welcoming as he assumed.
He resorts to low-paid construction work, before Van Buren offers him a once in a lifetime opportunity to design his county’s city hall.
Dismantling the myth
The change of heart came after Laszlo’s initial work garners acclaim from the city’s intellectual elite.
Van Buren is the conspicuous personification of American capitalists: glib, entitled, and insecure - an accurate specimen of the new world’s "nouveau riche".
He’s initially in awe of Laszlo’s singular talent and brainpower, repetitively telling him: “I've found our conversation persuasive and intellectually stimulating.”
The politics of The Brutalist are quite lucid: the film is essentially an anti-capitalist parable
Van Buren helps Laszlo to bring his wife, who is now wheelchair bound with osteoporosis, to America and promises him the freedom any artist dreams of.
As Laszlo gradually discovers, nothing in America is free; his artistic freedom becomes conditional not only to the whims and pride of Van Buren, but on his willingness to obey and say "yes".
The politics of The Brutalist are quite lucid: the film is essentially an anti-capitalist parable designed to dismantle the myth of the American dream.
Its political intentions are traced in various films released in the past century.
Notable precedents include Robert Florey’s The Face Behind the Mask (1941), about a Hungarian immigrant watchmaker who gets disfigured upon arrival to New York and is consequently forced into a life of crime.
There’s also Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980) about the real-life slaughter of European immigrants at the hands of American land barons in the 1890s.
Zionist subplot
The Brutalist deviates from these otherwise straightforward narratives in its aforementioned Zionist subplot.
In the first part of the film, an infamous 1948 radio broadcast by Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, declares the birth of the state of Israel with Laszlo listening.
For any European Jew, Ben-Gurion’s speech could not be ignored at the time.
Israel does not appear until the second part of the film when Zsofia, who may or may not have been subject to a sexual assault by Harry Lee, informs Laszlo and Erzsebet that she’s moving to Israel.
She asserts that it is the duty of every Jew to do aliyah but Laszlo and Erzsebet dismiss her call for them to follow suit.
“Does that make us less Jewish?” Erzsebet stubbornly tells her.
Later, Erzsebet changes her mine when Laszlo descends into heroin addiction before he’s raped by Van Buren.
Lying in hospital having nearly lost her life to a heroin overdose herself, Erzsebet finally tells Laszlo, “This whole country is rotten. I’m going to Israel to be with Zsofia and her child…. Come home with me.”
Laszlo obliges, and in the epilogue of the film, a middle-aged Zsofia reveals that her uncle, now ailing and immobile, did eventually move to Israel where he succeeded in creating the kinds of works he was never able to realise in the US.
At the end of her speech, Zsofia claims that her uncle once told her: “No matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey.”
'Historical necessity'
The migration of European Jewish Brutalist architects to Israel in the aftermath of the Holocaust is a historical fact.
Thousands of Jewish architects modelled the then newly established capital of Tel Aviv after their former homes in Berlin, Budapest, and Prague.
The prospects of an ambitious architect like Laszlo moving to Israel in the early years of the Zionist state were thus very plausible.
In that regard, the placement of Israel inside the narrative could be regarded as little more than a historical necessity required to transport the drama to its inevitable conclusion – a theory magnified by Laszlo’s ambiguous relationship to Judaism.
The placement of Israel inside the narrative could be regarded as little more than a historical necessity
Laszlo appears largely indifferent to religion, appearing rather bored and diffident whenever he’s in a synagogue. His prayers are ritualistic rather than spiritual; repetitive actions of a man going through the motion.
We never see Laszlo pray in private and he doesn’t seem to find solace within the Jewish community; his Jewishness transpires as a cultural if not an ideological identity, one he did not choose but was still punished for.
In one of the most telling scenes in the film, Van Buren asks Laszlo what he foresees as the legacy of his buildings in Budapest.
“When the terrible recollections of what happened in Europe have ceased to humiliate us,” he assertively says.
“I expect them to serve instead as a political stimulus, for sparking the upheavals that so frequently occur in the cycles of peoplehood.”
This is one the few instances where Corbet opens a portal to Laszlo ’s otherwise equivocal psyche.
Laszlo comes off as cipher; his artistic drive is rendered at times as a passionate struggle for an ideal beauty; at others, it transpires as sheer vanity.
At the end of the picture, it is revealed that his American project was motored by a hidden desire to eternalise his pain, trauma, and memory of the concentration camps.
In such a design, a more pronounced, more well-defined relationship with Israel, be it for or against, is not fitting.
At the end of the film, which is set in the 1980s, Laszlo is rendered mute, unable to articulate his thoughts and feelings about the Jewish state.
We never know if he felt at home in Israel; we never know if his artistic success came at a cost; and we never know what this “destination” he mentions to his niece actually means.
Laszlo’s great artistry and the emotional and physical violence he undergoes cannot conceal his self-centeredness.
He cheats on Erzsebet and mistreats his workers in his relentless pursuit of perfection, and endures ample humiliation and subjugation in order not to sabotage his cherished architectural creation.
He does not show any concern for politics; the creation of Israel as such emerges as a mere alternative to the American inferno rather than the great and ultimate Jewish Mecca that Zsofia envisions for herself.
The politics of Gaza
In his Venice press conference, Corbet rebuffed any interpretation linking his story with Israel’s war against Palestine.
“The film is about a character who flees fascism only to encounter capitalism. That’s what the movie is about,” he said.
To debunk the Zionism promotion theories even further, Corbet went out on a limb last week at the NYFCC awards to ask for the release of No Other Land, the Oscar-shortlisted documentary exposing Israel’s violent policies at the West Bank.
Guy Pearce, a long-time supporter of Palestine, meanwhile had a derisory response for a reporter who asked him about his feelings towards the ceasefire deal last week at the film’s UK premiere.
“Yeah, so thankfully all the people in Gaza can go back to their homes and live freely like they did on October 6,” Pearce, wearing a Free Palestine pin, said.
Corbet’s discourse is largely rooted in the current American political climate instead of the legacy of the Holocaust; his narrative does not rationalise the foundation of Israel as a home for persecuted Jews; it merely treats it as a plot point.
In another key moment in the film, Laszlo encounters a wealthy socialite Jewish convert whose Jewishness proves to be of no consequence to her social status.
In America, you can be anybody you want to be, as long as you have money and influence, just as long as you worship at the altar of capitalism.
Van Buren’s contempt for Laszlo has little to do with his Jewishness per-se and more with his foreign identity: a dirty Eastern-European with an enviable talent the American man believes he doesn’t deserve.
“When dogs get sick, they often bite the hand of those who fed them, until someone mercifully puts them down,” Van Buren tells Erzsebet near the end of the film.
Corbet has copiously discussed the current resurrection of fascism and the pitfalls of capitalism in relation to Laszlo’s predicament, making reference to Trump’s executive order in 2020 that banned Brutalist design for federal buildings.
Like Trump, Van Buren has no taste in art, a discipline he can never fathom.
His ignorance and parasitic nature, traits frequently applied to the president-elect, is what drives him to vie for sameness; to promote and populate what he only understands: the standardised and mediocre and mundane.
The Brutalist is the story of modern America’s derision of art, of any creative endeavour that has no immediate monetary value. America has no place for a man of Laszlo’s ilk, for defiant art that refuses to abide by the rules of the market – the real god of America.
The film was conceived eight years ago. Proponents of Israel have and will take the ending as a championing of Zionism. But the fact of the matter is, Israel is a historical footnote in a film that has bigger fish to fry.
Corbet is an outlier in the Hollywood hierarchy; any faint censure of Israel, especially its foundation, would have not been permitted, especially after the debacle around Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar acceptance speech for The Zone of Interest last year.
The Jewish Laszlo of 1947 could be the Palestinian or Mexican of 2025: a man humiliated, belittled, and violated for not ascribing to America’s tyrannical norms; for epitomising a difference that undermines America’s frantic self-superiority.
The aforementioned destination is not the spotless Jewish state Laszlo may have found peace and prosperity in, rather it is anywhere but America.
His legacy, after all, is not rooted in what he built in Israel, but in what he built outside America - in his amputated American creation.
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