Brutalist vs Brutalism

Like the rest of the Wellington Architectural Cognoscenti, I went to a special Architectural Centre showing of The Brutalist in the weekend, because I do love me some nice hard concrete edges. Harder than 60mPa, if you know what I mean. It is a film that has got Hollywood talking, having been nominated for many Academy Awards, if that’s the sort of thing that blows your skirt up. And yes, Adrian Brody and his special schnoz do indeed take the cake / the coke / anything else you could get up there. There is some lovely acting by a few others, although oddly enough, not so good from Guy Pearce, whose lines came out all rather stiff and stilted. Not the only thing that came out stiff, mind you, but that is a story for another day.

The curious thing though, if I can tell you a bit about things without entirely giving away the entire plot, is that there is not really much architecture in it, and certainly next to bugger-all Brutalism. I don’t need to spell out what we mean by Brutalism, that much maligned word deriving from béton brut, which is not a Welsh Champagne but instead it is an architectural style featuring a lot of raw concrete. So you might be thinking that The Brutalist would be full of bare concrete, but you may be disappointed. Of course, if you hate bare concrete, you might be delighted. So what is the film about then? We can take the Brutal part as read, seeing as it appears to start off in a concentration camp. Who or what is the Brutalist? Is the film about an Ist or an Ism?

I’m not going to tell you. That would spoil the (considerable) surprise. There is in fact quite a lot of scenes in the Carrara marble mountain, which are suitably gorgeous, being full of white marble and all that buggery, but personally, I would not classify Brutalism as being made of slabs of gorgeous white marble, no matter how enigmatic the workmen are. Shades of Howard Roark and the Fountainhead come flooding back to mind, with that haughty lady slapping the face of the hero architect, as he refuses to debase his creation for the sake of the mighty dollar. This is like that – only much, much longer. So long, in fact, that it has a real intermission, like we used to have back in 1972, when I would rush out to get an icecream and jaffas. Having seen the film in Wellington, there were no jaffas, but I did get an icecream…

Intermission

the reviews are in. Here is a snippet from The Guardian, who say:

“Bold, confrontational and oversized in every way imaginable, Brady Corbet’s wildly ambitious three-and-a-half-hour-plus epic The Brutalist represents a near-perfect symbiosis of subject with film-making style. It’s a huge, uncompromising cinematic statement about the creation of a huge, uncompromising architectural statement. It’s a paean to purity of creative vision in the face of petty ignorance and tightened purse strings, of noble personal sacrifice in the name of art. The kinship between the misunderstood modernist architect who finds worlds of both opportunity and pain courtesy of the fickle whims of wealthy American philistines and Corbet, a former US child actor turned independent film-maker, is there for all who choose to see it.”

Well, yes, that is as maybe, except why do you need to make up a fictional architect when there are plenty of real architects and their real buildings? The film presents Laszlo Toth, a Hungarian Jew, and his trials and tribulations of getting work in America. Except that there was no Laszlo Toth – in reality, Toth is a heavy metal guitarist from Hungary. Just kidding, he is actually a Hungarian-born Australian geologist. Similarly, while the Van Buren (the benefactor?) in the film seems like a nice guy, he never existed either. You may be thinking instead of Eddie Van Buren, who was a football player of some repute a few years back.

Toth is alleged to be an amalgam of more famous, real architects like Marcel Breuer or Erno Goldfinger, either of whom would be far more interesting as a subject than Brody’s pained Mr Toth; while I guess Mr Van Buren is a stand-in for more famous, real client-people like Mr Kauffman of Falling Water fame. Why not make an actual film about actual real life clients, architects, cooks and gardeners? Frank Lloyd Wright springs to mind as a great topic – but would people ever believe what happened to HIM ? !! Need I go on….?