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‘The Brutalist’ Explores the Dark Side of the American Dream
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What Happens to Van Buren in ‘The Brutalist”?
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What Does the Epilogue to ‘The Brutalist’ Suggest?
Spoiler Alert: Spoilers follow for The BrutalistBrady Corbet’s The Brutalist is one of the buzziest movies of 2024. Against all odds, the film lives up to the hype — The Brutalist is a staggeringly ambitious, enthralling spectacle that feels almost like a classic from the 1970s. It very well might be the best film of the year, period, and it seems a given that it’ll be an Oscar contender.
Clocking in at a runtime of just over three and a half hours (including a fifteen-minute intermission), the film is a massive undertaking, but it somehow feels half its length. The first act in particular includes some of the most exhilarating filmmaking of the last decade, proving a captivating immigrant saga and a clear-eyed look at the hollow promises of the American Dream. However, the second act gets significantly darker and goes in some unexpected directions, so we’re taking a look at the ending of The Brutalist, and what it all means.
5 /5
The Brutalist
- Release Date
- December 20, 2024
- Cast
- Adrien Brody, Guy Pearce, Felicity Jones, Joe Alwyn, Raffey Cassidy, Stacy Martin, Emma Laird, Isaach De Bankole, Alessandro Nivola, Michael Epp, Jonathan Hyde, Peter Polycarpou, Salvatore Sansone, Ariane Labed, Jeremy Wheeler, Jaymes Butler, Matt Devere, Natalie Shinnick, Stephen Saracco, Peter Linka, Robert Jackson
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‘The Brutalist’ Explores the Dark Side of the American Dream
The Brutalist’s two-act structure fits comfortably into a traditional “rise and fall” narrative. The first half, titled “The Enigma of Arrival," details a few years in the life of Hungarian-Jewish architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody), who emigrates to America after surviving the Holocaust. After trying and failing to find work, and facing constant prejudice and pressure to assimilate into American culture, László soon gets the opportunity of a lifetime from industrialist Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce).
Van Buren commissions him to design and build a massive community center (complete with a library, theater, and chapel) in honor of his late mother, in turn promising to help László’s wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and niece Zsófia get safe passage into the country. The movie’s second act, “The Hard Core of Beauty," kicks off when Erzsébet, now wheelchair-bound after developing osteoporosis, reunites with László, but her new presence quickly begins to sow the seeds of discontent in his business relationship.
To begin with, László’s intended design plans for the center are costly, and at one point Van Buren shuts down the project completely. This proves short-lived, and he and László soon journey to a marble quarry in Carrara, to get the materials to build a mantelpiece in the chapel. But their trip is a point of no return in their relationship; after a party the night before their return, Van Buren corners a heavily drunken László in the quarry and rapes him. It’s a shocking act, during which he chastises László for making himself “an easy target” and a “societal leech," reminding him who truly holds the power in their business arrangement.
If The Brutalist can be called a saga of the American Dream, this scene illustrates a depressing reality — while America has prided itself as a nation of immigrants, the powerful have too often exploited their labor for their own gain. Van Buren is clearly meant to stand as an embodiment of capitalism’s worst excesses, and a man who has no means of his own to create, but who instead wants to own and possess that which he knows he cannot have. Even though László is the true artistic genius, Van Buren is the one with the power and influence, and he won’t let him forget it.
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What Happens to Van Buren in ‘The Brutalist”?
Things only continue to go downhill from here, as Erzsébet runs out of pain medication for her illness. Now a full-on drug addict, László reluctantly starts using heroin on his wife as a painkiller, but one night she overdoses and almost dies. This, coupled with her husband’s emotional distance as he buries himself in his work, as well as the knowledge that they’ll forever be seen as outsiders in the country, proves the final straw for Erzsébet.
She decides to relocate to the newly established State of Israel (Zsófia moved to Jerusalem earlier in the film), believing it will be a safe haven for her as a Jewish woman. The broader global implications regarding Israel’s establishment are left unexplored, but they aren’t relevant to Corbet’s main point — that Erzsébet is unable to assimilate into American culture. And László, who seems to have bought into the “always move forward” mentality that defines our country, agrees to let her leave while he continues to try and find his own way.
However, before she leaves, she confronts Van Buren at his mansion, exposing him as a rapist in front of his children and business partners. His son (Joe Alwyn) violently attacks Erzsébet, and as the chaos subsides, everyone realizes that Van Buren has vanished. He’s nowhere to be found in the mansion, and the search quickly expands to the almost-complete chapel, but we never see any of his guards find him.
Thus, Corbet forces the viewer to come to their own conclusions about what came of Van Buren. The most obvious conclusion is that he committed suicide inside the chapel, knowing that Erzsébet’s accusation could permanently stain his family’s reputation. But since we never actually see a corpse, it seems just as likely that he could’ve disappeared without a trace and left for parts unknown. After all, a character meant to embody the worst sides of capitalism could just as easily relocate and reinvent himself once again while keeping his power, even if he no longer has László at his disposal to exploit.
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What Does the Epilogue to ‘The Brutalist’ Suggest?
But the film isn’t over yet. In a jarring time-jump likely to polarize audiences, the epilogue moves forward to 1980 in Venice, where a now-elderly László attends an exhibit about his life and work. At the event, a now-grown Zsófia gives a speech, during which she reveals that Erzsébet died shortly after the main plot ended, but that László continued a long and successful career in America. She also details that he eventually completed construction on the community center, and it’s revealed that its interior designs were modeled after those of the concentration camps he lived in for years.
This revelation casts László’s perfectionism from earlier in a different light — he saw building the center as a way to acknowledge the trauma he faced in the Holocaust and to build something meant to honor that emotional wreckage. It also suggests that despite the initial hardships, László was able to find a foothold in America without having to assimilate or give up his heritage. As Zsófia reflects in her speech, “no matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey.”
It also suggests another fascinating dimension to the film — that Brady Corbet is drawing a distinct parallel between the artistic experience and the immigrant experience. Much like László himself, his work is misunderstood by everyone around him; Van Buren only wishes to own it without understanding the personal qualities that actually shaped it. And just as László eventually managed to find his own way in America, his architecture endures outside the tides of history, and eventually comes to be understood by the world. And, much like the best artists, even if László had to face the threat of compromise, or make personal sacrifices to achieve his vision, in the end, for him at least, it was all about the destination. The Brutalist opens in New York and Los Angeles on December 20, before expanding nationwide in January.