“The Brutalist,” a supposed biopic loosely inspired by Marcel Breuer, is generating Oscar buzz, but not the kind its creators might have hoped for. While the film aspires to epic drama, it collapses under the weight of historical inaccuracies and baffling design choices. Director Brady Corbet’s “amalgam” protagonist, Laszlo Toth, shares superficial similarities with Breuer – Hungarian birth, Bauhaus training, furniture design background – but the film takes wild liberties with his life and the architectural movement he’s supposedly a part of.
The central problem? “The Brutalist” barely features any Brutalism. Critics, like Alexandra Lange, rightly lambast the film for its superficial understanding of the style. The climactic building, touted as Toth’s masterpiece, is deemed “early modernist,” not Brutalist, by experts like Victoria Young. It’s a glaring misstep, akin to making a Western without horses.
The film’s timeline is equally suspect. Toth’s portrayal as a post-war Holocaust survivor struggling for work in America clashes with the reality of Breuer and other Bauhaus figures, who arrived in the US pre-war as established professionals. The film’s depiction of Toth as a devout, heroin-addicted religious man further deviates from Breuer’s actual life.
Even the film’s technical choices are under scrutiny. While initially claiming AI was used for architectural renderings, Corbet later clarified they were hand-drawn, admitting only to using the technology for “poor digital renderings” in the epilogue. It’s a strange admission, raising questions about the film’s overall aesthetic vision.
Despite these criticisms, “The Brutalist” remains an Oscar contender. While some, like architect Robert McCarter, dismiss the historical distortions, the film’s core inaccuracies regarding architecture are hard to ignore. Even the monks of the supposed inspiration, Saint John’s Abbey, seem more amused than impressed by the film’s title, associating “Brutalism” with “gun parapets” rather than their own church. Ultimately, “The Brutalist” is a misnomer, a historical distortion, and a dramatic failure in its portrayal of both an architect and an architectural style.
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