Adrien Brody is the most beautiful man in Hollywood, and maybe on the planet. This has to do with the unlikely features of his face: it is profoundly narrow, with a pair of high brows sloping gently away from one another and a resolutely expressive pair of very thin lips, both ideally situated in orbit of a truly promontory, ponderous nose. He is tall and very thin, like Timothée Chalamet under a rolling pin, and has great hair too; his thick brunette waves lend him a perma-rakishness that stays intact throughout the horrors of World War II that his characters tend to have to endure. Brody is best known for portraying attractive, talented Holocaust survivors: Before The Brutalist, his best-known role was in Roman Polanski’s 2002 film The Pianist, in which he plays a Polish virtuoso pianist who narrowly escapes getting sent to Treblinka. In his latest, directed by Brady Corbet, he is László Tóth, an accomplished Hungarian architect who survives Buchenwald and emigrates to Pennsylvania.
The Brutalist begins with László’s arrival at Ellis Island, and follows him over the next decade or so as he tries to create a life in the United States. His experience of war is neither shown nor explicitly discussed—the film’s main focus is the way his talents and abilities are received in the U.S. László begins work as a designer at his cousin’s furniture business, where he creates, essentially, variations on Marcel Breuer’s Cesca chair; sexy leather-and-metal things too aesthetically pioneering for the doltish American consumer to understand. (“It looks like a tricycle,” says Audrey, his cousin’s shiksa wife, of his Bauhaus creation.) László’s big break comes when he and his cousin are commissioned to renovate a wealthy American industrialist’s reading room; László transforms its dreary, velvet-ensconced interior into a vast, sun-drenched space that features a singular, sculptural reading chair in the center. The industrialist, a suspiciously well-groomed man named Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), hates it and refuses to pay, and László is fired by his very own cousin. Our beautiful, talented protagonist thus finds himself destitute and unemployed, forced to find lodging at a homeless shelter and work at a construction site. In his despair, he picks up a heroin habit. It is only when László’s library renovation is lauded in magazine style sections as breathtakingly modern that the industrialist changes his mind. Van Buren plucks László from the gallows of back-breaking manual labor and offers him the opportunity of a lifetime: he wants László to design a massive community center in memory of his late mother; a kind of Protestant super-complex that is at once a gymnasium, a church and a library.
The visionary architect as a Great Man whose talent and creativity are the literal brick and mortar of our glorious Western civilization is not a novel concept. László certainly understands himself in this tradition: in an early conversation with Van Buren, he describes the function of architecture as a means of outwitting history by creating something that would outlive its cyclical changes: “When the terrible recollections of what happened in Europe have ceased to humiliate us, I expect [my buildings] to serve instead as a political stimulus, sparking the upheavals that so frequently occur in the cycles of peoplehood.” His creations aren’t designed to provoke any specific type of political upheaval; instead, he intends them as monuments to a yet-unwritten futurity that inevitably follows any mass social change. Here we encounter an articulation of the movie’s political ambivalence. History and its upheavals are frequent and possibly arbitrary, unlike buildings, which are solid and enduring. Architecture thus simultaneously concedes and attempts to thwart the inevitability of change; what László yearns for is not so much a better world as simply a world after this one. The inherent ressentiment of this idea reminded me of Ayn Rand, who in 1943 wrote in The Fountainhead that “civilization is the process of setting man free from men.” Her boorish philosophy finds its muse in a beautiful, talented young architect; hers is Howard Roark, whose proto-Brutalist designs provoked and offended the aesthetic norms of his era. Roark, like Adrien Brody, is in possession of a very striking physicality. This is key: “His face was like a law of nature … It had high cheekbones over gaunt, hollow cheeks; gray eyes, cold and steady; a contemptuous mouth, shut tight, the mouth of an executioner or a saint.” Roark is both sexy and aesthetically uncompromising—he gets all the girls and also blows up his own building rather than see it constructed below his standards. There’s just one key difference between the two protagonists: our László is a Hungarian Jew.
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László’s entire livelihood, not to mention his family’s very survival, depends on Van Buren, a sinister Protestant with an erratic appetite for his talent. This central relationship between László and his WASP benefactor is a microcosm of his struggle to stay afloat in the voracious postwar economy of a xenophobic, racist country. Outside of this orienting metaphor, we are treated to self-satisfied visuals that reiterate this basic premise: the first image we see of America is an upside-down Statue of Liberty set to a brass-heavy score, and, just as unsubtly, the movie’s final scene before the epilogue features (cue the brass) an upside-down cross. The Brutalist’s grandiose self-concept depends on the impression that its ambit is nothing less than man and society, but these visual missives that bookend the film are the extent of its commentary or criticism. The movie just isn’t interested in the complexities of László’s subjecthood as a Jewish immigrant; if it were, it could have, for instance, taken a closer look at his relationship with Gordon (Isaach de Bankolé), László’s black friend turned employee. Instead, it engages with its identity politics insofar as they convey an abstract aura of social injustice rife for protagonistic traversal. The Brutalist does this through one constantly reiterated conundrum: everybody wants to fuck László.
The first words said to László in America are spoken by a prostitute, who remarks “your face is ugly” while trying unsuccessfully to get him hard. A friend who traveled from Hungary with him exhorts him to “just fuck her” but László can’t, so he sighs, zips up, and steps outside for a cigarette. László’s second encounter with an American is also an unreciprocated sexual encounter: in a faintly flirtatious preamble to a later seduction attempt, Audrey, his cousin’s wife, tells László they know somebody who could “take a look at” his nose. Later, drunk and leering, László’s cousin insists that László dance with Audrey. (Bizarrely, right before this, he shoves László’s head under his work apron and humps his face.) László very reluctantly agrees to dance, but when Audrey later tries to sleep with him, he refuses. She retaliates by telling her husband that László made a pass at her, a false accusation which he does not even attempt to defend himself against. He’s just silent, his hazel eyes growing moony and dejected as he finds himself scapegoated and persecuted, once again.
Encounters of this nature abound in The Brutalist. Here we have László, high at a jazz club, stoically pondering the saxophones as a woman sucks on his face and neck; here, finally reunited with his wife, she jerks him off while whispering excitedly about their new life together, and he just lies there weeping, tears rolling sideways onto the pillow. In a scene before Van Buren rescues him from poverty, he’s mournfully standing in a darkened porn theater, not even masturbating—you find out that he just needed somewhere warm to sleep. László is silent in the face of unending sexual solicitation; he appears to us almost pre-resigned to his fate as a fetish object, so entirely dependent on structures of power that seek to extract and consume him that protestation is not only futile, it’s beside the point. László’s access to self-determination is limited to his mind: he is only free when he is creating, and in a way, when he is high. The first time we see our genius practicing his craft, his face handsomely illuminated by sparks as he welds his Bauhaus chair, we hear a radio broadcast of David Ben-Gurion announcing the end of the British Mandate for Palestine and the establishment of the State of Israel. Here the movie coyly lays out a central conceit: that for people like László, Israel and self-determination are coterminous.
The movie doesn’t care to make this point explicitly, though. Rather than full-throatedly declare Israel a Jewish homeland, it prefers to shroud its latent Zionism in an individualist discourse focused on beauty, talent and desire: a page from Ayn Rand’s playbook. Whereas Howard Roark’s physical beauty and architectural vision coalesce seamlessly into the gesamtkunstwerk of his civilization-defining projects, László is forced to peddle his wares in a country that is hostile and venal toward him simply because he is foreign and Jewish. His mind is generative and dignified, the progenitor of a memorial center that looks like something Kanye West could only dream of in the heights of his lithium-less Christ-themed mania, but his body is a cipher for the unfairness of identity: it is injured, starved and lusted after. The bodily-strife-as-immigrant-experience metaphor elaborates when László finally unites with his family: he discovers that malnutrition has left Erzsébet, his wife (Felicity Jones), wheelchair-bound, and though his niece Zsófia’s body is intact, she has been traumatized into total silence. For a majority of the movie, she does not speak. Zsófia’s (Raffey Cassidy) silence makes her an ideal avatar of the immigrant Other’s fate; she is someone for whom sexual violation is no more than a literalization of the social and material conditions that define her status in the country. In a scene shortly after her arrival, she is seen running away from Van Buren’s son (Joe Alwyn) who stumbles just behind her, adjusting his belt. It’s no surprise, then, that The Brutalist reveals the full breadth of its moral circuitry in a climactic scene where Van Buren follows a very inebriated László into an alleyway and rapes him. Right before the assault Van Buren says, “It’s a shame seeing how your people treat themselves. If you resent your persecution, why then do you make yourself such an easy target?,” as if being raped by your boss is an Animal Planet-style anthropological inevitability. László’s abject humiliation, his total domination, is the movie’s center of gravity, the core from which all other degradations and incursions emanate. In a scene shortly after his rape, László weeps to Erzsébet: “We are nothing. We are worse than nothing.”
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When Zsófia finally speaks, it is to tell her uncle and aunt that she will be moving to Israel. “Our repatriation is our liberation,” she says, sounding like a settler cyborg. László and Erzsébet are initially confused by her conviction that Israel is the only place Jewish people could go to be safe. “Are we not Jewish?” asks László. After the rape, things change. The American Dream has been revealed as a nightmare; there is no dignity to be had here. This revelation is, of course, telegraphed through somatic disruption: one night, Erzsébet experiences a bout of extreme pain, and László injects her with heroin to relieve her. Temporarily suspended from the anguish of embodiment, the two have sex; this is the first time in the film that László has consensual sex with another person. Their bliss is short-lived, though: Erzsébet overdoses and a distraught László rushes her to the hospital. She survives, and claims, in near-death, to have “met God.” God wants her to go to Israel. “Do you remember everything you confessed to me at home in our bed?” she asks László, referencing the rape. “The harm done unto us was done only to our physical bodies,” she whispers. Indeed their souls are intact and worth saving: he agrees to follow her to Israel.
Ah, Israel, where the Jewish mind and the Jewish body can exist in harmony, safe from the daily indignities of life in a society that resents and exploits you. We never see Israel in The Brutalist, just like we never see Hungary, but are directed to imagine that perhaps László and Erzsébet and Zsófia are happy and healthy there, and maybe even a little tan. The promise of Israel-to-come is so literally healing for Erzsébet that right after they agree to make aliyah, she is miraculously able to stand. She is standing, with a walker, when she confronts the Van Burens: “Your father is an evil rapist,” she says to a dining room full of mustached WASPs. The articulation of the crime—something neither László nor Zsófia could muster—unleashes chaos. Overwhelmed by this accusation, Van Buren’s rapist son knocks the walker from under her and drags her out of the dining room. In the commotion that ensues, Van Buren himself goes missing, and a search party looks for him in the still-incomplete building he commissioned, looming and creepy in its monochromatic emptiness. It really does look like Kim Kardashian’s house. Van Buren is never found; instead, the camera pans to a gigantic, illuminated cross, the crowning feature of László’s design. Except it’s upside down.
The epilogue of The Brutalist is set in the 1980s, featuring a retrospective of László’s work at the Venice Biennale. A few shots of gondolas gliding through Venetian canals set to unsettling upbeat techno music later, we are introduced to the exhibit, titled “The Presence of the Past,” via an AI-generated montage of the various buildings László has completed in his lifetime. Like the upside-down Statue of Liberty and cross, the title of László’s retrospective consolidates the pretense of a historical analysis that the movie establishes then conspicuously evades for its compensatory pet discourses about beauty, sex and drugs. We never find out whether László actually did make aliyah to Israel—most of the buildings in the exhibit were built in the U.S. The important thing we glean from the ending is that László won, that his aesthetic vision was able to cohere, despite the vicissitudes of history and its petulant whims. Zsófia, the only character we know to live in Israel, takes the stage to honor her uncle, and makes the movie’s final pronouncement: “It is the destination, not the journey.” We never find out where that destination is, and the idea that it wouldn’t matter is the ultimate iteration of the film’s disinterest in history. The carnage Jewish people endured in Europe, and that which they perpetrated in Israel, are referenced merely as furniture for the film’s self-concept as a sweeping treatise on beauty and civilization. They’re shiny symbols of historicity that are never seen, barely mentioned and completely uncharacterized; they form an apolitical substrate that fosters an ambient, low-effort Zionism, one that demands of viewers nothing beyond a basic appreciation for the unfairness that the Tóths experience. He’s so pretty and talented, things are so unfair, naturally they would want to go to Israel.
“There is obviously a tremendous amount of anti-Semitism today,” Adrien Brody said, after winning a Golden Globe for his portrayal of László. “It’s intimate to me, the roles that I’ve played.” He trailed off into a paean to “storytelling.” Like The Brutalist, he’s not saying much, but he looks damn good doing it.
Adrien Brody is the most beautiful man in Hollywood, and maybe on the planet. This has to do with the unlikely features of his face: it is profoundly narrow, with a pair of high brows sloping gently away from one another and a resolutely expressive pair of very thin lips, both ideally situated in orbit of a truly promontory, ponderous nose. He is tall and very thin, like Timothée Chalamet under a rolling pin, and has great hair too; his thick brunette waves lend him a perma-rakishness that stays intact throughout the horrors of World War II that his characters tend to have to endure. Brody is best known for portraying attractive, talented Holocaust survivors: Before The Brutalist, his best-known role was in Roman Polanski’s 2002 film The Pianist, in which he plays a Polish virtuoso pianist who narrowly escapes getting sent to Treblinka. In his latest, directed by Brady Corbet, he is László Tóth, an accomplished Hungarian architect who survives Buchenwald and emigrates to Pennsylvania.
The Brutalist begins with László’s arrival at Ellis Island, and follows him over the next decade or so as he tries to create a life in the United States. His experience of war is neither shown nor explicitly discussed—the film’s main focus is the way his talents and abilities are received in the U.S. László begins work as a designer at his cousin’s furniture business, where he creates, essentially, variations on Marcel Breuer’s Cesca chair; sexy leather-and-metal things too aesthetically pioneering for the doltish American consumer to understand. (“It looks like a tricycle,” says Audrey, his cousin’s shiksa wife, of his Bauhaus creation.) László’s big break comes when he and his cousin are commissioned to renovate a wealthy American industrialist’s reading room; László transforms its dreary, velvet-ensconced interior into a vast, sun-drenched space that features a singular, sculptural reading chair in the center. The industrialist, a suspiciously well-groomed man named Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), hates it and refuses to pay, and László is fired by his very own cousin. Our beautiful, talented protagonist thus finds himself destitute and unemployed, forced to find lodging at a homeless shelter and work at a construction site. In his despair, he picks up a heroin habit. It is only when László’s library renovation is lauded in magazine style sections as breathtakingly modern that the industrialist changes his mind. Van Buren plucks László from the gallows of back-breaking manual labor and offers him the opportunity of a lifetime: he wants László to design a massive community center in memory of his late mother; a kind of Protestant super-complex that is at once a gymnasium, a church and a library.
The visionary architect as a Great Man whose talent and creativity are the literal brick and mortar of our glorious Western civilization is not a novel concept. László certainly understands himself in this tradition: in an early conversation with Van Buren, he describes the function of architecture as a means of outwitting history by creating something that would outlive its cyclical changes: “When the terrible recollections of what happened in Europe have ceased to humiliate us, I expect [my buildings] to serve instead as a political stimulus, sparking the upheavals that so frequently occur in the cycles of peoplehood.” His creations aren’t designed to provoke any specific type of political upheaval; instead, he intends them as monuments to a yet-unwritten futurity that inevitably follows any mass social change. Here we encounter an articulation of the movie’s political ambivalence. History and its upheavals are frequent and possibly arbitrary, unlike buildings, which are solid and enduring. Architecture thus simultaneously concedes and attempts to thwart the inevitability of change; what László yearns for is not so much a better world as simply a world after this one. The inherent ressentiment of this idea reminded me of Ayn Rand, who in 1943 wrote in The Fountainhead that “civilization is the process of setting man free from men.” Her boorish philosophy finds its muse in a beautiful, talented young architect; hers is Howard Roark, whose proto-Brutalist designs provoked and offended the aesthetic norms of his era. Roark, like Adrien Brody, is in possession of a very striking physicality. This is key: “His face was like a law of nature … It had high cheekbones over gaunt, hollow cheeks; gray eyes, cold and steady; a contemptuous mouth, shut tight, the mouth of an executioner or a saint.” Roark is both sexy and aesthetically uncompromising—he gets all the girls and also blows up his own building rather than see it constructed below his standards. There’s just one key difference between the two protagonists: our László is a Hungarian Jew.
●
More good mail days.
Join our newsletter.
László’s entire livelihood, not to mention his family’s very survival, depends on Van Buren, a sinister Protestant with an erratic appetite for his talent. This central relationship between László and his WASP benefactor is a microcosm of his struggle to stay afloat in the voracious postwar economy of a xenophobic, racist country. Outside of this orienting metaphor, we are treated to self-satisfied visuals that reiterate this basic premise: the first image we see of America is an upside-down Statue of Liberty set to a brass-heavy score, and, just as unsubtly, the movie’s final scene before the epilogue features (cue the brass) an upside-down cross. The Brutalist’s grandiose self-concept depends on the impression that its ambit is nothing less than man and society, but these visual missives that bookend the film are the extent of its commentary or criticism. The movie just isn’t interested in the complexities of László’s subjecthood as a Jewish immigrant; if it were, it could have, for instance, taken a closer look at his relationship with Gordon (Isaach de Bankolé), László’s black friend turned employee. Instead, it engages with its identity politics insofar as they convey an abstract aura of social injustice rife for protagonistic traversal. The Brutalist does this through one constantly reiterated conundrum: everybody wants to fuck László.
The first words said to László in America are spoken by a prostitute, who remarks “your face is ugly” while trying unsuccessfully to get him hard. A friend who traveled from Hungary with him exhorts him to “just fuck her” but László can’t, so he sighs, zips up, and steps outside for a cigarette. László’s second encounter with an American is also an unreciprocated sexual encounter: in a faintly flirtatious preamble to a later seduction attempt, Audrey, his cousin’s wife, tells László they know somebody who could “take a look at” his nose. Later, drunk and leering, László’s cousin insists that László dance with Audrey. (Bizarrely, right before this, he shoves László’s head under his work apron and humps his face.) László very reluctantly agrees to dance, but when Audrey later tries to sleep with him, he refuses. She retaliates by telling her husband that László made a pass at her, a false accusation which he does not even attempt to defend himself against. He’s just silent, his hazel eyes growing moony and dejected as he finds himself scapegoated and persecuted, once again.
Encounters of this nature abound in The Brutalist. Here we have László, high at a jazz club, stoically pondering the saxophones as a woman sucks on his face and neck; here, finally reunited with his wife, she jerks him off while whispering excitedly about their new life together, and he just lies there weeping, tears rolling sideways onto the pillow. In a scene before Van Buren rescues him from poverty, he’s mournfully standing in a darkened porn theater, not even masturbating—you find out that he just needed somewhere warm to sleep. László is silent in the face of unending sexual solicitation; he appears to us almost pre-resigned to his fate as a fetish object, so entirely dependent on structures of power that seek to extract and consume him that protestation is not only futile, it’s beside the point. László’s access to self-determination is limited to his mind: he is only free when he is creating, and in a way, when he is high. The first time we see our genius practicing his craft, his face handsomely illuminated by sparks as he welds his Bauhaus chair, we hear a radio broadcast of David Ben-Gurion announcing the end of the British Mandate for Palestine and the establishment of the State of Israel. Here the movie coyly lays out a central conceit: that for people like László, Israel and self-determination are coterminous.
The movie doesn’t care to make this point explicitly, though. Rather than full-throatedly declare Israel a Jewish homeland, it prefers to shroud its latent Zionism in an individualist discourse focused on beauty, talent and desire: a page from Ayn Rand’s playbook. Whereas Howard Roark’s physical beauty and architectural vision coalesce seamlessly into the gesamtkunstwerk of his civilization-defining projects, László is forced to peddle his wares in a country that is hostile and venal toward him simply because he is foreign and Jewish. His mind is generative and dignified, the progenitor of a memorial center that looks like something Kanye West could only dream of in the heights of his lithium-less Christ-themed mania, but his body is a cipher for the unfairness of identity: it is injured, starved and lusted after. The bodily-strife-as-immigrant-experience metaphor elaborates when László finally unites with his family: he discovers that malnutrition has left Erzsébet, his wife (Felicity Jones), wheelchair-bound, and though his niece Zsófia’s body is intact, she has been traumatized into total silence. For a majority of the movie, she does not speak. Zsófia’s (Raffey Cassidy) silence makes her an ideal avatar of the immigrant Other’s fate; she is someone for whom sexual violation is no more than a literalization of the social and material conditions that define her status in the country. In a scene shortly after her arrival, she is seen running away from Van Buren’s son (Joe Alwyn) who stumbles just behind her, adjusting his belt. It’s no surprise, then, that The Brutalist reveals the full breadth of its moral circuitry in a climactic scene where Van Buren follows a very inebriated László into an alleyway and rapes him. Right before the assault Van Buren says, “It’s a shame seeing how your people treat themselves. If you resent your persecution, why then do you make yourself such an easy target?,” as if being raped by your boss is an Animal Planet-style anthropological inevitability. László’s abject humiliation, his total domination, is the movie’s center of gravity, the core from which all other degradations and incursions emanate. In a scene shortly after his rape, László weeps to Erzsébet: “We are nothing. We are worse than nothing.”
●
When Zsófia finally speaks, it is to tell her uncle and aunt that she will be moving to Israel. “Our repatriation is our liberation,” she says, sounding like a settler cyborg. László and Erzsébet are initially confused by her conviction that Israel is the only place Jewish people could go to be safe. “Are we not Jewish?” asks László. After the rape, things change. The American Dream has been revealed as a nightmare; there is no dignity to be had here. This revelation is, of course, telegraphed through somatic disruption: one night, Erzsébet experiences a bout of extreme pain, and László injects her with heroin to relieve her. Temporarily suspended from the anguish of embodiment, the two have sex; this is the first time in the film that László has consensual sex with another person. Their bliss is short-lived, though: Erzsébet overdoses and a distraught László rushes her to the hospital. She survives, and claims, in near-death, to have “met God.” God wants her to go to Israel. “Do you remember everything you confessed to me at home in our bed?” she asks László, referencing the rape. “The harm done unto us was done only to our physical bodies,” she whispers. Indeed their souls are intact and worth saving: he agrees to follow her to Israel.
Ah, Israel, where the Jewish mind and the Jewish body can exist in harmony, safe from the daily indignities of life in a society that resents and exploits you. We never see Israel in The Brutalist, just like we never see Hungary, but are directed to imagine that perhaps László and Erzsébet and Zsófia are happy and healthy there, and maybe even a little tan. The promise of Israel-to-come is so literally healing for Erzsébet that right after they agree to make aliyah, she is miraculously able to stand. She is standing, with a walker, when she confronts the Van Burens: “Your father is an evil rapist,” she says to a dining room full of mustached WASPs. The articulation of the crime—something neither László nor Zsófia could muster—unleashes chaos. Overwhelmed by this accusation, Van Buren’s rapist son knocks the walker from under her and drags her out of the dining room. In the commotion that ensues, Van Buren himself goes missing, and a search party looks for him in the still-incomplete building he commissioned, looming and creepy in its monochromatic emptiness. It really does look like Kim Kardashian’s house. Van Buren is never found; instead, the camera pans to a gigantic, illuminated cross, the crowning feature of László’s design. Except it’s upside down.
The epilogue of The Brutalist is set in the 1980s, featuring a retrospective of László’s work at the Venice Biennale. A few shots of gondolas gliding through Venetian canals set to unsettling upbeat techno music later, we are introduced to the exhibit, titled “The Presence of the Past,” via an AI-generated montage of the various buildings László has completed in his lifetime. Like the upside-down Statue of Liberty and cross, the title of László’s retrospective consolidates the pretense of a historical analysis that the movie establishes then conspicuously evades for its compensatory pet discourses about beauty, sex and drugs. We never find out whether László actually did make aliyah to Israel—most of the buildings in the exhibit were built in the U.S. The important thing we glean from the ending is that László won, that his aesthetic vision was able to cohere, despite the vicissitudes of history and its petulant whims. Zsófia, the only character we know to live in Israel, takes the stage to honor her uncle, and makes the movie’s final pronouncement: “It is the destination, not the journey.” We never find out where that destination is, and the idea that it wouldn’t matter is the ultimate iteration of the film’s disinterest in history. The carnage Jewish people endured in Europe, and that which they perpetrated in Israel, are referenced merely as furniture for the film’s self-concept as a sweeping treatise on beauty and civilization. They’re shiny symbols of historicity that are never seen, barely mentioned and completely uncharacterized; they form an apolitical substrate that fosters an ambient, low-effort Zionism, one that demands of viewers nothing beyond a basic appreciation for the unfairness that the Tóths experience. He’s so pretty and talented, things are so unfair, naturally they would want to go to Israel.
“There is obviously a tremendous amount of anti-Semitism today,” Adrien Brody said, after winning a Golden Globe for his portrayal of László. “It’s intimate to me, the roles that I’ve played.” He trailed off into a paean to “storytelling.” Like The Brutalist, he’s not saying much, but he looks damn good doing it.
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