In ‘The Brutalist,’ the Suffering Is the Point

Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist tells the story of László Tóth (played by Adrien Brody), a fictional Jewish Hungarian architect who immigrates to the US to rebuild his life and career after the Holocaust. In its basic contours, it’s an architect-as-hero tale that tracks with Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead: An uncompromising genius battles philistines, less talented peers and controlling patrons to realize his forward-looking designs.

But Corbet, over three-plus hours, bends this familiar arc and points it somewhere new. Instead of celebrating the American dream, he critiques it. And he makes Tóth the avatar for a raw, polarizing and imported architectural style — concrete-heavy Brutalism, which emerged in Europe during the postwar years.