The Enduring Brutality of The Brutalist

I did not quit. I endured the brutality of The Brutalist until the end, but I must admit that at 1 hour and 16 minutes, I felt myself drifting away. Too many questions lingered.

The film was sold as a biopic of visionary German-Hungarian architect Laszlo Toth. But here’s the twist: the “Laszlo Toth” character—the architect—is not a real person. Go ahead, google it. I have this odd feeling that this is a social experiment designed to pull internet sleuths into figuring out who the real Laszlo Toth is. (Will the real Laszlo Toth please stand up?) In fact, if you do google it, you’ll find an article titled The Brutalist: Who is the Real Laszlo Toth?

“Laszlo Toth” is an uncommon name, one would think—yet no cigar. It turns out many people bear this name, and they each have backgrounds that are, well, absurdly diverse. Toth could be a painter, vandal, politician, writer, boxer, songwriter, race car driver… you name it, “Toth” has probably done it. It’s almost as if the name leads to successful careers, or at least unusual ones.

Looking deeper, it becomes clear that The Brutalist draws inspiration from two real architects: Marcel Breuer and Erno Goldfinger. It leans more heavily toward Breuer, from what I gathered. (These are architects I never encountered in my studies—perhaps because their designs don’t inspire the kind of work I would want to create.) Still, what’s intriguing is that Breuer, much like the fictional Toth, was a Hungarian Jew, an architect, and—surprisingly—a member of the Bauhaus school, founded by Walter Gropius. And what did I post yesterday? A quote by Sir Roger Scruton about the architectural approaches of Gropius and Le Corbusier. How serendipitous is that?

Marcel Breuer

Speaking of Scruton, his views on Gropius and Le Corbusier are far from flattering; in fact, they’re brutal. In The Aesthetics of Architecture, Scruton critiques the concept of “human need” that defined much of modernist thought, particularly in the works of Le Corbusier. Scruton writes:

Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius

“Contemporary architectural theory has posed itself in terms of a concept which has proved of great rhetorical significance in the development of modern architecture: the concept of a human ‘need.’ It was this concept which guided Le Corbusier, not only in his plans for the destruction of cities in the interest of rest and football, but even in the most basic principles of his thought. According to Le Corbusier, the human being has a need for air, light, open space, movement—everything, in short, that is not architecture; the high glass tower raised on pilotis above a park seemed almost a deduction from this statement of the human ‘problem.’ This is not to say that Le Corbusier was in any sense affected by the anti-aesthetic ideology of our hypothetical constructivists. Nevertheless, the absurdity of his plans, and the manifest dissatisfaction with his ‘solution,’ suggest that this concept of a ‘need,’ in its standard architectural usage, is an impoverished one, and can be used to reduce architecture to a species of ‘problem-solving’ only by fundamentally misrepresenting the architect’s purpose.”

So what’s left to add? The portrayal of Laszlo Toth and the institute doesn’t exist. And if the film is inspired by Breuer, why invent a fictional character? Why create Laszlo Toth when Breuer himself—who had a complex history—would have sufficed?

The movie’s attempt to engage with the world of brutalism (and modernist architecture, as described by Sir Scruton) is, ironically, brutal in itself. It serves more as a test of endurance than an engaging story. If anything, The Brutalist ends up wasting the moviegoer’s interest, leaving us with more questions than answers. And that, unfortunately, is all I have to say about that.