The Brutalist and New Creation

There is an emphasis on hands in Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, which has been nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.

Hands are constantly at work throughout the film: welding chairs and designing shelves, flipping coins in cruel jokes, lighting cigarettes, administering drugs, touching bodies, lifting glass cupolas—and dropping them, so that they shatter in fragments on the ground below. Hands are a fitting symbol for The Brutalist’s epic tale of American wealth and architecture. Hands build and shape, they welcome and they block the way, they strike and are marred, they touch and they transgress.

The Brutalist opens in the hold of a ship arriving at Ellis Island, bringing European emigrants fleeing the wreckage of World War II. Among these refugees is László Tóth (Adrien Brody), an architect of renown before he was imprisoned in a concentration camp. Separated from his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy)—fearing them dead—Tóth heads to America. Tóth’s time in the United States gives him a quick introduction to New World wealth and prejudice. A brief stint with his cousin goes poorly, given the way his cousin’s wife treats him with cold judgment. His artistic passion is revealed when a new project arrives that would give him free rein for his creative skill, but the customer—wealthy businessman Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce)—proves to be a complicated, fickle patron. Their relationship will define the rest of the film—and Tóth’s experience in this new country.

The Brutalist is monumental in nearly every sense, from its score to its classic structure (including an overture and intermission), from its performances to its thematic scope. Despite the clean lines and weighty material of Tóth’s designs, the film itself is a shapeshifter. Ideas stretch out like tendrils, some of which remain dormant and some of which persist through the narrative arc: the ways that power co-opts art for its image, the refugee experience in America, the myth of the great artist and the facade of the self-made man, anti-Semitism, Zionism, addiction, the vanity of American wealth. But at its core, The Brutalist is about what this act of creation is aiming toward: What are we making?

This question orbits around Tóth’s work. It’s explicit for the characters—the designers and builders who doubt his plans, the townsfolk who are reluctant to leave the design of a Christian chapel in the hands of a Jewish man—and implicit for the audience. We aren’t confident what is driving Tóth, as Brody’s sincere performance contains enough gamesmanship to keep us guessing. Even when others (employers or family members) speak of his motive, it’s not clear that they’re anywhere near the truth.

In his book Culture Making, Andy Crouch defines culture as “what human beings make of the world.” There are two crucial facets to the definition. First, culture is an act that we participate in. Secondly, we create from the material we find in the world. Tóth works with concrete and marble, while his designs are rooted in his own experiences and vision of the world. Those are experiences Van Buren can’t share, a vision that the townspeople can’t imagine. What Tóth is making—and why—is anyone’s guess until it’s finished.

Crouch turns this question toward all of us, well beyond the study of architecture. We are all creating, building toward some end, whether that’s in our work, in our families, in our communities, or in our country. What are we making, and why? Tóth’s culture making is solid and emphatic, but Van Buren’s is no less real as he cultivates a life that dominates and appropriates the lives of others. This, too, forms a culture—one that’s far too recognizable.

In the characters of Tóth and Van Buren, The Brutalist juxtaposes two modern myths related to culture: the myth of the Great Artist and the myth of the Self-Made Man. But those are not the only models for us. Crouch looks for a generative approach rooted in the work of Jesus Christ: “The resurrection shows us the pattern for culture making in the image of God. Not power, but trust.” In Christ we find a compassionate, generous use of power that brings us into real communion with God. That unity, empowered by the Holy Spirit, reorients how we are called to create. “The basic thing we are invited to do with our cultural power is to spend it alongside those less powerful than ourselves,” Crouch writes.

Amid all of its scattered ideas, The Brutalist is most fascinated (both narratively and formally) by the act of creativity, the difficulty of making something, and the curiosity of what the result will be. It also exposes how that act can be destructive, serving only to prop up egotism, resulting in relational and social collateral. Reflecting on The Brutalist invites us to reflect on our own acts of creation, which we participate in every day.

Crouch refers to this as “a profound program of embodiment,” which brings us back to the symbol of hands. Our hands—our bodies—are how we engage with the world and all its material. And that engagement—with dirt, stone, metal, and other creatures—is informed by our history and experiences. Like Tóth, our experiences shape how and what we create. But we are not limited by our victories or sufferings, for we are also new creations in Christ, called to a ministry of reconciliation. The Brutalist and Culture Making move us to ask: What will we create—and for what purpose? Let us create new possibilities in this world, as people who are new creations. Let us take these hands and put them to good use.

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At Think Christian, we encourage careful cultural discernment. We recognize and respect that many Christians choose not to engage with pop culture that contains particular content, such as abuse, sex, violence, alcohol or drug use, or that employs the use of coarse language. To that end, we suggest visiting Common Sense Media for detailed information regarding the content of the particular pieces of pop culture discussed in this article.