Bravo to ‘The Brutalist’

If I told you that I was upset that “The Brutalist” did not win the Academy Award for best picture, I would not be lying. “Anora” is a fine multilayered film, and it deserves its accolades, but it does not compare with Brady Corbet’s cinema masterpiece. For me, the Corbet movie is a powerful and foreboding look at the situation of the American Jew.

I have lived in this great country all my life, but when I heard on screen that the Jew is just “tolerated,” it sent shivers up my spine. That has certainly not been my experience, but as Timothée Chalamet, playing Bob Dylan in another terrific film, “A Complete Unknown,” sings onscreen, “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” They certainly are!

At the opening of “The Brutalist,” two-time Academy Award recipient Adrien Brody staggers onto a ship’s deck, accompanied by orchestral fanfare. He portrays Hungarian Holocaust refugee László Tóth, an accomplished architect who has barely survived Buchenwald. It feels like a natural progression from Brody’s memorable performance in Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist,” where Władysław Szpilman emerges from the Holocaust. Now it is time for Brody’s brutalist to leave the horrors behind, escape despair, and come to America. Yet Corbet warns us, through an inverted Statue of Liberty, that he is entering a broken America.

Cinema is filled with scenes of immigrants arriving in America. Barry Levinson’s 1990 film “Avalon” captured an arrival showered in July 4th fireworks. Somehow that is how I imagined my 4-year-old father, alongside my grandparents, encountering America. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” That vision was my America: a land of liberty and promise long denied to my ancestors in Eastern Europe.

“The Brutalist” challenges that nostalgic myth. László Toth’s journey underscores the present reality — a fractured nation increasingly defined by exclusion rather than welcome. In teaching, I often recounted tales of a time when the triumph over antisemitism was a collective victory, championed not just by Jewish resilience but also by allies. One example is in 1947, when two movie studio heads — a spirited young Jew, Dore Schary, and a brazen non-Jew, Darryl F. Zanuck, took on bigotry in their films “Crossfire” and “Gentleman’s Agreement.”

Today, “The Brutalist’s” raw portrayal of rejection mirrors a modern America that seems to have lost its way. Corbet’s narrative is a reminder that our understanding of history and identity is ever evolving. The juxtaposition of idealized arrivals with the gritty truth of contemporary prejudice forces us to confront a nation that is not as luminous as we once believed. Even as Tóth’s architectural talent is increasingly appreciated, he is told dismissively that “they tolerate him.” As the film unfolds, it becomes painfully clear to Tóth, his wife, and the viewer that the message is unambiguous — they don’t want us here. Alternative places of refuge are offered, but I leave that to the viewer to contemplate. This film is a call to remember that the freedoms we enjoy here were hard-won — and that for many, the promise of America has dimmed. I certainly have never been in this place before.

In 1790, President George Washington visited the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, and reassured the congregants who had fled religious tyranny that life here would be different. He even wrote a letter to the community, saying that the government of the United States gives “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” What would he think now?

Eric A. Goldman of Teaneck is an adjunct professor at Yeshiva University and the author of “The American Jewish Story through Cinema.” The Jewish Broadcasting Service aired his most recent Jewish Cinematheque interview, which was with Wendy Sachs, writer/director of “October 8,” earlier this month. Find it at www.jbstv.org.

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