“The Brutalist”
Decades ago, Elie Weisel unloaded on the practitioners of Holocaust filmmaking. He felt that their efforts were juvenile and disgusting, a disgrace to the enormity of the event itself. It would be better, he felt, not to speak at all than to somehow diminish the horror of the Sho’ah. Its impenetrable evil was beyond depiction, at least by most artists (Weisel excepted?) who embraced the task.
As you can imagine, this was no sidebar utterance. Weisel was in the first flush of his fame, and quickly coming into the exalted status of his later years. There was an original review that focused on “Bent,” the stage play that foregrounded the persecution of homosexuals. He hated the famous scene where the two protagonists talk each other into orgasm, separated by a fence. But that version seems to have disappeared. The article in the archive makes a more far-reaching claim, that Holocaust artmaking is a general failure.
I think that Weisel might have hated “The Brutalist,” the masterful film made by director Brady Corbet. In one of the opening scenes, Laszlo Toth (Adrian Brody) is brought to a sweaty, shuddering climax by a prostitute at a shabby New York brothel. Other customers are visible in the background. The scene is admittedly beyond the orbit of the camps; Toth has been liberated and sponsored to America by a cousin. But it might have offended Weisel all the same. It is carnal, desperate, and does not focus on the evil that, for Elie Weisel, is the only subject worth addressing.
But it forces us to ask if Weisel was right: that there is only one kind of filmmaking that suits the Sho’ah, and only one style or focus that is worth the investment. “The Brutalist” suggests that there are many alternatives, each of which has something valuable to convey. Apart from everything else, “The Brutalist” captures, authentically and with real imaginative insight, the political and cultural cross-currents of liberation, and the changing nature of Judaism in America.
More to the point, it uses sex as a tool to tell us that the Holocaust did not end with a thud, like the breaking of a fever or the end of a trainride, but that its victims were cast into a storm of experiences that were brutal, destabilizing, and frequently humiliating on their own. Toth ends up in the household of his cousin, Atilla, where he re-enacts the shattering scene in Genesis in which Joseph is framed by Potiphar’s wife. We later see him struggle toward intimacy with Erzsebet, the wife he finally manages to bring to America. It’s an agonizing process (more screaming, more nudity) complicated by drugs and paralysis and Lazslo’s retreat from contact, but another way of tracking the fitful return to life.
A scene toward the end is perhaps the most disturbing of all. In a film shot through with glancing hints of homoeroticism, Toth is raped by his great WASP patron, Van Buren. He’s an ugly portrait of a prissy plutocrat who dismisses his own wife to serve his fragile mother. Overwhelmed with envy of Toth’s artistry and sophistication, Van Buren ravishes him in the corridors of an Italian quarry, which seems to replicate the building that Toth is building in America. The artist must be brought low in the bowels of his great work.
This is, ultimately, the climax of the film; the rest works out the implications of the rape. The point here is that sex is not ancillary to the story or a betrayal of the cause of Holocaust filmmaking, but a legitimate tool in the building of a narrative that could not be told without the graphic punch of sexuality. “The Brutalist” is brutal—not a philosophical exercise, but whole-body filmmaking that passes every test, even if it would have offended Elie Weisel.