The Brutalist is full of surprises. The characters are not who you expect - not in the Scooby Doo ending kinda way, but in the more subtle, incremental ways that real people reveal themselves - they unfurl over time, in new context, or when forced by circumstance.
Here the circumstance is post-WWII-horror. Adrien Brody's Laszlo, a jewish architect who escaped the clutches of bloody Europe, ekes into the welcoming arms of America - or is confronted by them - in a frenetic opening sequence that evokes being literally birthed by the Statue of Liberty. His becomes a journey of perpetually navigating life's variety of horrors: existential, professional, familial, intimate - never taking his eyes off the prize of grand achievement, and never assessing the value of that prize to begin with. What's the lesson?
Is it the shameful discovery that his success wasn't born in spite of his trauma, but because of it? Do we owe a debt to abuse? To the forces of culture, country, power and those who wield it, in the building of our brutal legacies (and homelands)? Are our lives gasoline that gets burned up en route to some place more meaningful?
The movie is charming, cool looking, and not boring (did you hear it was long?). It feels like it's based on an old novel - a mysterious tome that I would love to mine for some of the details the movie refuses to share. But there is no novel. This aging Man's search for meaning becomes ours as well. And any greater understanding of Lazslo's arrival, his families' machinations, his country and rootlessness, for better or worse, feels up to us to construct.
