Category Archives: Historical

Living in Washington, D.C., I spend a lot of my commute time staring up at the Brutalist architecture around me—huge and hulking structures built of bare concrete, testaments to the sheer assertion of power. Beloved by much of the architectural establishment but detested by many laypeople, Brutalism has proven extraordinarily controversial over the years, even giving rise to a 2020 executive order that would’ve ended the use of the style for federal buildings.

Indeed, Brutalism can even be interpreted as a deep-rooted movement away from the classical Western emphasis on truth, goodness, and beauty. In the words of architect Mark Bittoni, “The philosophy behind Brutalist architecture is rooted in the belief that architectural design should prioritize functionality, honesty, and social purpose.” There is little room for depth, transcendence, or subtlety here.

Brady Corbet’s sprawling new historical epic, The Brutalist, is at once both a celebration of the style and a subversion of it. As a film, The Brutalist takes the form of a biographical drama centered on (fictional) Hungarian Jewish architect—and concentration camp survivor—László Tóth (Adrien Brody). Separated from his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) in Europe, László is thrown headlong into the chaotic churn of postwar American society and forced to find menial work beneath his professional talents. 

When a home-renovation job leads to a chance encounter with wealthy industrialist Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce), László’s luck changes: Van Buren admires László’s daringly modern aesthetic and commissions him to build a strange new structure. The building, sited on Van Buren’s property, will be a sort of community center housing four institutions under one roof: a gym, a theater, a library, and a Christian chapel. Despite the oddness of the ask, László agrees and sets to work—designing a castle-like Brutalist building and vigorously beating off efforts to compromise or change his vision.

When Erzsébet finally arrives in America, several years into László’s work, she finds her husband a different man—scarred by past traumas, and obsessed by present concerns. László is distant, barely able to relate to her as husband to wife—despite struggling for years to bring her to America. Difficulties and delays impede his creative work for years. But in the end—after all these tensions, finally, culminate in a shocking act of violation and tragedy—László prevails, at least in a way.

In a haunting epilogue set years after László’s “vindication,” the truth comes out: if Brutalism is, historically, defined by its “honesty” and straightforwardness, then what László has been doing, all this time, is not in fact “Brutalist” at all. Rather, his creative work has been animated by a deep symbolism and purposiveness—indeed, by love. 

Given its slow pace, grim and heady themes, and extended runtime—over three and a half hours—The Brutalist is far from mainstream fare. And yet at the same time, Corbet’s film—anchored by Brody’s performance—manages to remain utterly compelling. The Brutalist is really several stories in one—a story of artistic perfectionism (a la Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead), a story of bittersweet romance, a story of American capitalism, and a deeply intimate story about specifically Jewish life in America—and the lengthy runtime simply serves to give these interlocking tales the breathing room they warrant. (I can’t recall the last time I saw a movie that had an overture and intermission—maybe The Hateful Eight?—but they are welcome inclusions here.)

Over and beyond and through all this, of course, is the thematic question that dominates the film: what is Brutalism? What is its place? And here, I must concede that—despite all the critical things I’ve said about the style over the years, and all the mental epithets I’ve directed at the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building every time I pass it—Corbet’s film led me to think a little bit differently about Brutalism. Perhaps—beneath all the pontificating about authenticity, honesty, and a rejection of ornamentation and meaning—no architect can ever truly fail to pursue the Good, in some way or another. Perhaps even the most apparently flawed art has, within itself, the germ of its own redemption.

And that is a thought well worth taking four hours out of my life to ponder.

For a movie centered on the “father of the atomic bomb,” Oppenheimer depicts its most fateful sequence in understated fashion. The day that “Fat Man” actually goes off over Hiroshima, our haunted protagonist first learns of it from a staticky radio broadcast. There’s no courtesy call, no news footage, no social media feeds. Instead, J. Robert Oppenheimer sits nearly alone in the quiet recesses of the Los Alamos laboratory, a piece in a grand geopolitical drama that far exceeds him. Events are now out of control in a very frightening way: they have burst the boundaries of the lab once and for all, and nothing can be the same again.

Oppenheimer is director Christopher Nolan’s first film since 2020’s disastrous Tenet. And it may be his best—a sprawling, stark, eerie meditation on the tension between the cold purity of physics and the grubby realities of the human world, all seen through the eyes of a singularly troubled figure (Cillian Murphy). Like its central character, it is a profoundly ambiguous film that defies easy political or ideological characterization.

Like most recent Nolan films, Oppenheimer plays around with its cinematic timelines, cutting back and forth between scenes from Oppenheimer’s life and career, the postwar investigation into his security clearance prompted by Oppenheimer’s past Communist associations, and finally a Senate confirmation hearing for potential Commerce Secretary Lewis Strauss (a superb Robert Downey Jr.), who finds himself tainted by his own history with Oppenheimer. 

And there’s certainly a lot of ground to cover. We first glimpse a young Oppenheimer sparring with his tutors and bringing quantum theory from Europe to America, before it’s on to his troubled marriage to Kitty (an underused Emily Blunt), and his dalliances with Communist femme fatale Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh). Eventually, of course, he’s called up by General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) to head the enigmatic Manhattan Project and build an atomic weapon. All of this culminates in the legendary “Trinity” test in the New Mexico desert, the thunderous proof-of-concept for the bomb that changed the world.

But then, of course, bureaucracy intervenes, as Oppenheimer’s trustworthiness—with the Soviet Union ramping up its own atomic capabilities—comes into question. Were Manhattan Project security clearances handed out too cavalierly? Should Oppenheimer’s aversion to hydrogen bomb development be seen as sincere concern, or as disloyalty? In the era of the “Red Scare,” who can say?

That’s not to say, though, that Oppenheimer is a partisan hit piece (indeed, it probably skews conservative—“Communism” is a faceless and shadowy presence throughout, and it’s clearly Oppenheimer’s hamartia). Rather, the questions here are much bigger, cutting to the nature of scientific endeavor itself. 

As the film builds to its denouement, there’s a sense in which its text feels familiar enough. On the face of things, Oppenheimer mounts an extended plea for scientific independence over against political meddling. Keep the messy business of value judgments out of the lab, Oppenheimer and his colleagues protest over and over again to whomever will listen. Communists, capitalists, whomever—it’s all just noise. They want to be left alone to do their work, and maybe wrestle with the moral dimensions when they feel up to it.

But this is an old storytelling trope, and Nolan is savvier than that. The subtext of the film is that this quest for scientific neutrality is an utterly impossible fantasy. There is no lab work, especially not in wartime, that stands apart from fundamental value judgments. Oppenheimer’s choice to develop the bomb is simultaneously a choice to place it into the hands of American politicians. His choice to flirt with Communism is a choice to question whether America should be trusted with that kind of power. 

This is a truth that Nolan’s Oppenheimer can never quite bring himself to acknowledge outright. “Nobody knows what you believe,” a friend challenges Oppenheimer late in the game. “Do you?” And it’s a fair question. This Oppenheimer is a moral cipher, simultaneously brooding over the horrors of the atomic age while glorying in the thrill of his accomplishment. He can’t quite make up his mind—and Nolan declines to do so for his audience. The central question remains.

Like every Nolan film, this is a technical masterpiece featuring top-notch performances—especially, of course, Murphy’s spectral Oppenheimer—and pristine production design. And it’s all backed by a haunting score by Ludwig Göransson that (pleasingly) recalls Clint Mansell’s work on The Fountain. Happily, though, in this case it’s the characters and themes, more than just the craftsmanship, that lingers in the mind.

In the end, perhaps, the best reading of Nolan’s Oppenheimer is as a tragedy. That’s because, at bottom, it is more than just the story of one visionary man. It is the tragedy of the modern technological mind more broadly—the pursuit of physical mastery without correspondingly firm convictions.

That ambiguity may be profoundly human, of course. But as the stakes grow higher, it is an ambiguity the world can less and less afford.