Because The Brutalist was A Real Pain

I’m glad to see I’m not alone in my very mixed reaction to Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist”. Dana Stevens at Slate summarized my thoughts so well- admiring the ambition, the score, the sweeping stone architecture and green landscapes, and of course, Adrien Brody’s stunning performance. But, after nearly 4 hours, what does it all mean? Like a shipment of concrete early in the film, the movie really goes off the rails in the last hour. Especially the ending.

And I couldn’t help but compare “The Brutalist” to “A Real Pain”, which I found much more satisfying. They’re not in conversation with each other- one is an epic, take-me-seriously-as-an-artist film, and the other is a small, sweet movie about two people bonding on a trip together. And yet what connects them is the common theme of intergenerational trauma, namely among Jews in America. Dave and Benji are cousins who travel to Poland to honor their grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, and although they’re very different on the surface, they both inherit Grandma’s real pain in their own ways- Dave by being OCD and neurotic, and Benji by being a recent survivor of a suicide attempt. He’s not doing well. The movie ends as it begins, with Benji sitting in the airport, lost in thought. His jourey has just begun.

At the end of “The Brutalist”, the protagonist’s niece shares an aphorism of his, which to paraphrase, goes, “It’s about the destination, not the journey”. What is this final statement about? The niece emigrated to Israel. Are we to believe that Israel is the ultimate destination for Jews everywhere? Yes, Laszlo had a difficult time in America, dealing with alienation and anti-semitism. And from the look of the final scene of the film, a celebration of his career near the end of his life, he was the architect behind many structures in America. Was America the destination where he was able to fulfill his ambition? That blunt final statement, at the end of a long look at Laszlo’s new life in America, feels out of place after a movie of such lofty ambitions. And I won’t get into the film’s Italian interlude, which I found unnecessary and the beginning of the film’s undoing. It shows a lot, but what does it say? I’m not sure it knows.