It is easy to conclude that Adrien Brody “steals the show”
in his depiction of Laszio Toth in The Brutalist (2024), a film about a Jewish
architect (and his wife and niece) who emigrates to Pennsylvania from Hungary
after World War II. As I was stretching my legs after watching the very long
yet captivating film in a theater, a woman doing the same declared to me that
Adrien Brody had definitively stolen the show. I wasn’t quite sure, though I perceived
Guy Pearce’s acting out Harrison Van Buren to be emotionally fake, even forced.
In understanding the film, it is vital to go beyond the obvious characters (and
actors) to acknowledge the roles of two silent yet very present characters as
definitive for the meaning of the film. Before revealing those characters, the proverbial
elephant in the room must be discussed: Being Jewish even in the modern, “progress”-oriented
world.
It is not long after Laszio sits down to talk with his initial
host—Attila, the cousin—that the religious question comes up. Although Attila
is Jewish, his wife Audrey is Roman Catholic and Attila has converted. Laszio
shocked not only at this, but that Attila has changed his last name to the
Americanized Miller. In the next scene, set outside, we see a large “Jesus
Saves” lit sign in the background; in the foreground is bread-line, which is
out of bread. Jesus may save souls, but apparently not hungry bodies. The implication
is that Attila sold his soul in giving up his religion to fit in.
It is not that Laszio carries any grudge against
Christianity; it had not been the force behind the Nazi’s Final Solution, and
thus behind the concentration camp where both he and his wife Erzsébet had (separately)
been sent. “Dreams slip away,” Harrison observes. Laszio can of course relate;
he says at one point that he had no choice but to come to America. No longer a
working architect, and unfairly deprived of housing by his cousin once in Pennsylvania,
Laszio must stay in homeless shelter and shovel coal for work. To him, America
is no shining city on a hill; he tells his wife at one point, “They don’t want
us here. We are nothing; we are worse than nothing.” He has internalized the external
prejudice against Jews, and perhaps may feel on some level that his internment
in a concentration camp to have been justified. The Brutalist is not a
light film.
To be less than nothing may be justified by the
infliction of suffering and even death on others, as the Nazis did; to be
forced to endure the sting of such intense hatred is on the contrary not to
be less than nothing. Interestingly, we could say that the innocent civilians
in Gaza in 2023-2024 were not less than nothing; less than nothing is
applicable instead to the Israelis who can be implicated in and killed 55,000 Gaza
residents and made more than a million homeless (even bombing in a tent camp).
As these numbers far exceed the 1,200 Israelis who died and the couple hundred
Israeli hostages, justified natural justice was also far exceeded by vengeance.
That the Jewish deity saves that for itself makes this verdict all the more
damning.
Just the president of Israel was wrong in his insistence that
every resident of Gaza was guilty and thus deserved to suffer, so too it would
be wrong to conclude that every Jewish person was culpable for the horrendous over-reaction
in killing tens of thousands of Gaza residents and making many, many more
homeless and facing famine and a shortage of medicine. Jewish people generally
need not be in the awkward psychological position of both presuming to be the
chosen people and a people that is worse than nothing.
Just as Laszio suffers wrongfully in interiorizing the
sentiment of prejudiced people that Jews are worse than nothing, he does not have
to carry his memory of the death-camp into his architecture. A drawing of one
of his buildings is labeled, “The past in the present,” which conflicts with
his intention that his buildings not only endure stylistically, but are apart
from time. The underlying problem is that a human artifact cannot both hold on
to the past and yet have an ambiance of eternity. The huge, cement building
that he designs for Harrison looks like a giant tomb, such as the ones constructed
in ancient Egypt. At the same time, the dark, hard-solid walled rooms could
pass for the gas chambers used by the Nazis to kill people at the concentration
camps. Laszio carries his dark past into his architecture in the “new world.”
That he intentionally uses light to show a Christian cross in the distinctly
Christian chapel in the building may connote the hope that had been utterly
absent in the death camps. Laszio’s pride in this architectural achievement is ironic,
given both his skeptical reaction to his cousin’s conversion to Catholicism to
fit in, but it is not as if Laszio might convert to Christianity. After all, “Jesus
Saves” is associated in the film with no bread left in the bread-line.
I submit that Christianity and the Holocaust are the two
silent partners, or characters, in the film. That the consulting architect is a
Protestant is no accident, for the city wanted assurance because Laszio is
Jewish. Christianity is also present in Attila and Audrey’s bedroom in the form
of a crucifix on a wall, and perhaps most explicitly in Harrison’s insistence that
the chapel be distinctly Christian, rather than a prayer room as Laszio initially
proposes. The light shown in the chapel from the cross on the ceiling cannot be
missed in the otherwise gray tomb-monstrosity of a building.
As for the Holocaust, its subtle imprints can be found
throughout the film. Perhaps that character is most felt—most present—not in
the tomb-like rooms in the partially constructed community center—and it is odd
that the public would want to spend leisure time surrounded by walls, floors,
and ceilings of cement—but when slabs of cement are loaded onto a freight
train. The heavy, almost deafening thuds on a drum, the iron tracks, and the
train itself conjure up the trains on the way to the Nazi death-camps. When the
train crashes, the fire may even evoke the ovens in the camps. It is perhaps no
accident that the film has Harrison fire and evict Laszio (recall that his own
cousin, the Christian Attila, kicked Laszio out earlier). The sudden freight
of having to fend for oneself (and one’s family) is felt existentially, and
such a fear must have been felt by the victims of the Holocaust. To subject
anyone to such freight is to render oneself, rather than the victim, as worse
than nothing.
Both Christianity and the Holocaust are very much present
in the film, and yet obliquely so. The implicit message may be that as much as
we want to be free of the past, it’s imprint can be found all around us. Why
didn’t Christianity come to the rescue of the Communists, Jews, and gays in the
Holocaust? Both hope and despair seem to coexist without cancelling each other
out. What lies beyond Laszio’s attraction to the cross in the context of the
tomb, and his unconscious interest in reimaging the dingy inner sanctum of a
death camp? Why didn’t “Jesus Save” as the neon sign in the film insists? To be free of the past does indeed lie in Laszio’s
free-will, as it does for the rest of us, even though existential trauma, if
left to its own devices, can reverberate through time if the severity is sufficiently
intense to leave imprints in not only the human mind, but also its constructed
artifacts. The human mind is perhaps too fragile for what people are all too
willing to inflict on others. Not even our religions seem to be enough.
