Movie #5: A Preliminary Response to The Brutalist

Image from The Brutalist, A24

 

A Sprawling Exploration Following a Sprawling Movie (WARNING: very mild spoilers for The Brutalist)

Overture:

I’ve committed to a lofty goal—to watch 104 movies in 2025. Two movies a week. It’s a new type of goal for me, as I have never been much of a movie lover, let alone any sort of meaningful critic. It’s a goal that is all but assuredly destined to transform me into either a “Letterboxd bro,” (an archetype of cultural consumer I’m not sure I’m prepared to model) or an overheated movie podcast superfan collecting downloaded past episodes of The Rewatchables and The Big Picture as if they were Infinity Stones.

This weekend involved watching my fifth movie of the year, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, at Chicago’s Regal City North Theater, in my first trip to the theater in 2025. The Brutalist is a four-hour marathon cataloging the story of a Jewish Hungarian architect (László Tóth) as he struggles along the lonely road of immigrants escaping war-torn Europe, while approaching impregnable class dynamics all-but-permanently worn into American culture. The premise as a whole can be summed up as: an artist attempts to bring a singular, utopian artistic vision into a world of capitalism and brute power.

The movie is visually stunning, filmed in Vistavision (a 35mm film with a horizontal orientation, allowing for much larger and higher-definition video that was mostly used initially to capture a sense of scale in Western movies). It is a true work of new art, regardless of how the plot flies off the tracks in the second act, as though a derailing train carrying concrete.

As I walked away from my largely negative views of the movie as a whole and reflected more fully on what I’d seen, I felt a growing discomfort that I often feel whenever dealing with art. Whether walking the halls of Chicago’s Art Institute or attending the Symphony Orchestra, a lone questions stalks the enjoyment and joy I try to find in appreciating the beauty of a work of art:

How can I consume art if I am not producing it?

***

Part 1:

I’m far from defining myself as an artist. I’m a public geospatial analyst and urban planner in local government—hardly positions where someone who seeks out a creative type would look. My friends will remind me that I am notoriously bad at committing to a hobby, let alone a hobby focused on cultivating some sort of end product I’d define as creative. I would also do not credit myself as being uniquely observant of artistic value or expression—simply put, I’d describe myself as “dolt” before “auteur.” I struggle to feel like I bring things of creative value into the world.

And thus when I sit down to enjoy a beautiful movie (even ones with poor plot construction), a painting that conveys a litany of ideas in a few brush strokes, or really anything else of any beauty, I feel some sort of responsibility to be producing and participating in the creative response in return.

It’s an odd thought, though maybe it’s one you’ve encountered before. I’m not sure why this uncomfortable pressure arises. Is it a fear of falling into mindless consumption, feeling the unfairness (unsustainability?) of a life lived taking over receiving? Is it fear of a sort of hedonism which does disservice to art, treating it as just another object to consume without responsibility? Is it fear that if I’m not participating in the creative process myself, I’m not able to fully appreciate and actually do service to art, lacking a personal understanding of the challenges that are all-but-universal to those who participate in creative life?

I’m not sure. But much of this guilt seems to stem from a sense of failed responsibility or duty to handle art a certain way, which leads to a better question:

Do we have a responsibility to create, to produce, at a minimum in response to that which we intake?

***

Part 2:  

This question feels like an obtuse observation to make at a movie which is expressly about the violent dampening of art when subject to the forces of capitalism, a system of economic thought which so heavily relies on valuing people by their level of productivity at the expense of all else.

After all, The Brutalist is a movie which demonstrates the difficulty that comes when artistic vision from those without power brutally collides with gatekeepers of resources and influence necessary to bring many visions to life. Production, especially of good and virtuous things, is stifled and diluted and made excruciating by the powers of the world.

Corbet tries to show the limits of productivity, exposing questions around how to define productivity at all when it comes to art. In the movie, the success or failure of the architect’s edifice is not determined by the ability to successfully bring a vision to life on a hill over Doylestown, Pennsylvania, but rather to appease the ego of the one funding and enabling the work in the first place. Tóth’s vision only becomes possible by circumstance, by little ability of his own.

Production is fraught and fragile, and in a fallen world, so much of what we produce (maybe art most of all) is filtered through economic and social forces that are beyond our control. In many instances, it can limit the ability to create and produce art at all. Production of more art and beauty cannot serve as the only available response to art and beauty around us.

So if not in our own production or creative work, then what is the proper response to art? What am I supposed to do when I see something creative that affects me in some way?

***

Epilogue:

Without spoiling the movie for those who have not seen it, László Tóth succeeds in bringing his vision into the world, albeit at alarming cost to himself and the people around him. In light of that cost paired with the grand scale of his work, what would the worthy response be to such costly beauty on a hill outside Doylestown? At a smaller scale, what is the worthy response to the four-hour visual masterpiece that Tóth’s world is illustrated within, which was the product of seven years of turmoil and painful patience as the screenplay awaited the opportunity to come to life? Certainly some response is warranted, right?

I reflect on words shared from my advisor at Calvin (hello, Dr. Bjelland, if you’re reading this) as we sat at a small table at Hall Street Bakery last year, talking about a research project which began almost six years ago and slowly crawls toward completion.

“Research is a gift to the world.” He expressed to me that any sort of research project “is new knowledge, new understanding, and that deserves to be shared with the world.” Some of his last words of the afternoon ring in my ears: “research invites people in.”

This wasn’t a conversation about art—it was a conversation about an unpublished research project, and I’m not entirely convinced yet that research writing is even art, no matter how important and wonderful as it may be. But I think it was illustrative of a worthy response to art and beautiful things.

At its core, genuine research requires response to knowledge. A movement to response to knowledge requires a respect for and ability to sense the beauty of true things, such that it is worth communicating and sharing, of responding in some way. Not all new knowledge and understanding results in new research written and published; but the value of research lies in being a response, to invite people to new conversations and new ideas.

Walking away from the world of László Tóth and The Brutalist, I’m more convinced that art doesn’t require us to produce or create art alongside it to properly engage with art. It doesn’t require us to participate directly in the creative process, the perpetuation of art, in order to receive; the movie painfully shows the limits of our capacity to do so.

But should we find ourselves affected by art, it does still carry a responsibility to respond to reap the true goodness of art. Response can vary: sharing a piece of art and inviting someone into the experience. Maybe something as simple as a change of heart or virtue about something small. Such things are not production or creative work, but they are responses to beauty.

And in that good response, once in a while someone is moved to jump into the creative process to capture their own response. And maybe then they’ll end up producing new art alongside the old.

When he looks at beauty in the only way that beauty can be seen—only then will it become possible for him to give birth not only to images of virtue but true virtue. The love of the gods belongs to anyone who has given birth to true virtue and nourished it, and if any human being could become immortal, it would be he.” – Plato