Fin: 'The Brutalist' and the question of Zionism

Plus: The Golden Globes are here, a fascinating new Substack, and more.

Image: A24

As I’ve mentioned quite a few times, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is my favorite film of 2024 and one that I believe will go down in the coming years as an all-time classic. It finally opens in wide release, including in Philadelphia, a week from today, and I’m excited for people I know outside of the film critic profession to see it. I’m working on two different pieces about the film that will be published in the next couple of weeks, and my Monday essay here will also cover that film.

Ever since The Brutalist’s festival run started in the fall, one aspect of the film has been going on in the background of the discussion, especially on social media and Letterboxd: The film’s treatment of Zionism.

To go over it, using some spoilers: The Brutalist is the epic story of László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Holocaust survivor and Bauhaus-trained architect who comes to America after the war, settles in the Philadelphia area, gets a commission from an industrialist (Guy Pearce), is reunited with his wife Erzsébet and niece Zsófia (Felicity Jones and Raffey Cassidy). Due to a long series of events, begins to sour on what the movies typically present as the American Dream.

The film touches on Zionism in the following ways: In 1948, we hear a radio broadcast of David Ben-Gurion declaring Israel’s independence. At some point in the 1950s, Zsófia informs László and Erzsébet that she plans to move to Jerusalem along with her new husband, who is an observant Jew. László objects to this — mostly, it appears, because he doesn’t want his niece to move away — but ultimately, the couple makes aliyah. A few years later, after more bad events in America, Erzsébet tells László she wants to go to Israel as well, and László says that he’ll follow her there.

The Brutalist then jumps to an epilogue in 1980, when an elderly László, in a wheelchair and unable to speak, is being honored at the First Architecture Biennale in Venice. A now-adult Zsófia gives a speech about her uncle at the Biennale’s Israeli pavilion, where she references “our first years in Jerusalem” and goes on to echo something she says her uncle once told here about the importance of the destination rather than the journey.

In a film that runs about three and a half hours, these are the only references to Israel or Zionism. I like that it plays with some of these ideas and that it leaves them in such a way that is open to interpretation. I tend towards viewing it as the survivor characters souring on America, especially after dealing with condescension and antisemitism, and heading to Israel as a salve from that. And Tel Aviv is where many of the real-life Bauhaus architects ended up.

Brady Corbet and others associated with The Brutalist, in interviews they’ve given about the film and this aspect of it, have been fairly coy, which adds to my long-held instinct that when filmmakers leave things ambiguous and open to interpretation, they tend to do so for a reason, and that if they wanted to be didactic, they would do so in the work itself.

But The Discourse hasn’t seen things that way. And some reviews have landed on a specific interpretation: That the film is about “who owns the memory of the Holocaust,” while others have accused the film of being both too Zionist and not Zionist enough.

A piece by Rueben Baron in Hey Alma, I think, got it close to right, calling the film “A Yom Kippur confessional prayer for America”:

Already I’ve seen social media reactions calling the film “Zionist propaganda,” while others have argued the nuances of the epilogue are delivering a subtle anti-Zionist message. I’m honestly not sure what Brady Corbet thinks about Israel — if a Jewish filmmaker like Jonathan Glazer received so much hatred for criticizing the Israeli occupation last awards season, I can only imagine a gentile like Corbet would rather have his art speak for itself. The message I think is clearest in “The Brutalist,” whether read as pro- or anti-Zionist, is an explanation for why Zionism became so appealing to American Jews in the first place. America’s sins and Israel’s are forever intertwined.

But there’s another interpretation that I’ve seen in multiple places: When Zsófia speaks in 1980, she’s putting words in the mouth of her uncle, who doesn’t actually believe in anything she’s saying about journeys or destinations or Israel, and that she’s dishonestly hijacking his legacy, at a time when he’s unable to speak himself. And I can’t stress enough that there’s nothing in the text of the movie that supports this.

Leave aside that we’ve seen no indication in the previous three hours that Zsófia is a dishonest or manipulative individual.

In the 25 years of screen time that we don’t see, Laszlo Toth has become a famous, internationally renowned architect. From what we see of him, he’s an opinionated man, and if he had, say, turned against Zionism at some point, only to have his niece declare the opposite… people present at the ceremony honoring him would know it, and she would know that she couldn’t get away with it. Like, if the Oscars honored a famous director who’s in his 90s… everyone watching would have some general idea of what that director’s political views are and would be quick to call it out if a relative characterized them inaccurately.

The Zsófia-is-lying theory is not even an interpretation. That’s just seeing something in the movie that is not there.

And besides, the main thing about the epilogue that’s notable is a certain revelation about Laszlo’s architectural motivations, much more than anything about Israel or Zionism. And we’re given no reason to believe, based on anything in the film, that that particular revelation isn’t accurate.

Noah Kulwin, in his review at Screen Slate this week, says this:

Whatever power The Brutalist summons in its rags-to-perhaps-Zionism story is blunted by the unwillingness of its story to actually end where it leads. The film freely depicts the destruction of heroin addiction, the hidden cost of creative patronage, and how love is sustenance and wounds either heal or fester with time. But with Zionism, Corbet and Fastvold prove unable to even intimate the horrible truth to which it amounts: that the victims of the Nazi Holocaust, and even those further subject to American abuses of capitalist exploitation might be capable of perpetrating the same crimes against someone else.

This is the classic argument of, “why is this movie about the things it’s about instead of the things I want it to be about?”

I think some people would have liked The Brutalist more if it had ended with László Tóth rising from his wheelchair, looking right at the camera, and declaring “I denounce Israel, free Palestine!” But that would be a very different movie from the one that actually exists.

Or as the famous tweet goes…

At least we can all agree that the score is fantastic, right?

Golden Globe nonsense

The Brutalist, by the way, is nominated for several Golden Globes, including for Best Picture, Drama.

The Globes are this Sunday, and I won’t be watching, mostly because the Vikings and Lions will be clashing to decide the NFC North at the same time. But there’s another reason why: The Globes are super-duper corrupt, and always have been.