Brutalopolis

“GOOD ARCHITECTURE should always be applauded,” a foppish Roman says early on in Peter Greenaway’s The Belly of an Architect (1987). In Megalopolis and The Brutalist, there is no architecture to applaud (an odd thing to do in any event, as Greenaway underscores)—only architects. You haven’t heard of them before these movies, but you already know them: iridescing egoists in the Howard Roark mold, fingering grease pencils and T-squares and prone to obliquities of speech easily mistaken for profundity. Hailed by fickle paymasters as the bringers of new epochs, they are just as soon punished for the impudence of their gifts, more readily stated than shown. Then: confirmations of overcoming, diegetic displays of approbation, cut to black.

Megalopolis and The Brutalist (both 2024) are parables of the madness of creation. Here, personifications of pure, uncut genius square up against philistinism and its legion of jowly middlemen. One film was made by an eccentric filmmaker long in the tooth and with money to burn, the other by a disaffected young actor turned director. Auteurs, then. Their architect stand-ins are brutalists in the pathologizing sense—unalive to any sentiment that deviates from their own pet obsessions. So, artists. Adam Driver’s Cesar Catilina endures the rejection of his ideas beneath a cracked mask of mannerism, while Adrian Brody’s László Tóth is a scaffold for suffering. They persist because of their persecutions. If their character arcs betray an architectonic, it is the propulsive illusion of inevitability.

Nothing is guaranteed. Most building projects never come to fruition, just as most film scripts are pulp-in-waiting. Critics of both movies have seized on the parallel between auteur and master builder. The filmmaker, whose domain is flickering light, covets a more lasting permanence. The architect aspires to the fantasy and fame that is still cinema’s property. Movies allow us to get what we want, without the consequences.

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA’S MEGALOPOLIS flouts the formulae of modern moviemaking—an industry existentially obligated to congratulate itself—by refusing to adopt the jaded outlook, and bong-murky color-grading, of today’s blockbusters. In its giddy willingness to court thought taboos, the movie rejects the uniformly torpid character of our political culture and our cultural politics. As the unelected head of an autonomous authority seen exercising eminent domain, Catilina, a billionaire architect-inventor, thwarts the banal New Urbanism that Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) wishes to impose on New Rome. His counterproposal is all effulgent grace, vague in the extreme but seductive for that same reason. Leaning out over the parapet of the Chrysler Building, he discovers he can stop time and set the world right again. Through his mastery over the fourth dimension, Catilina exists to antagonize historical reality. “Don’t let the now destroy the forever,” he says, imploring Mayor Cicero to renounce the view of the termite (“Jobs!” Cicero retorts) and adopt the outlook of the longtermist.

When Megapolis was released in theaters last fall, disapproving critics upbraided its Great Man portrayal of Catilina—a Shakespeare-spouting hybrid of power broker Robert Moses and Randoids like Roark and John Galt. Were they to revisit the film now (unlikely), these naysayers might more readily identify Driver’s caped, K-holing visionary with Mr. Dark MAGA himself. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has scythed through the federal workforce with the casual recklessness displayed by Catilina’s Design Authority, which, like DOGE, appears to be exclusively staffed by teenage Schumpeterians. When the bombs they set bring down a Section 9 block, they cheer, though they may as well be screaming, “Creative destruction, yeah!”

The character of Catilina—in fact modeled on Catiline, the first-century demi-Crassus who bankrolled a popular uprising against the decadent Roman consults, only to be quashed by Cicero—persisted throughout Coppola’s innumerable revisions. (Cesar was initially Serge. That name, evoking the Galois-smoking crooner, would have nicely comported with the vintage Citröen DS that transports Driver across town.) Doubtless, the master builder is a hoary stock character—grandstanding, masculinist, ostentatiously self-identical with his desire—but one that meshes with Coppola’s distinctive brand of fabulism. To my mind, the scriveners who pillaged the movie for the callowness of its portrayal of designerly authority shut their eyes to the purposes of art, which owes us nothing but fidelity to its own potential. Architecture, a fraught enterprise by comparison, looks on hungrily.

THE BRUTALIST, Brady Corbett’s three-and-a-half-hour “biopic” on the fictional Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor László Tóth, never once asks us to question its hero’s talent, let alone his genius. Prodigy is conferred when Tóth, having survived the traumatic passage from Buchenwald to New York Harbor before moving on to Philadelphia, where he’s put up by a cousin who owns a furniture store, produces facsimiles of bicycle-frame chairs fifteen years past their sell date. And again when he oversees a library conversion in a Doylestown mansion, commissioned by the prodigal son of a local industrialist who, unaware of the alteration, explodes with anger upon seeing it. Later, the penitent tycoon presents Tóth, turned out of his kin’s home and working as a coal shoveler, with photographs of his buildings back home in Budapest. “Where did you study?” Guy Pearce’s Harrison Van Buren asks Tóth. “Bauhaus in Dessau,” the latter mumbles as his eyes well with emotion.

Van Buren has done his homework; he already knows the answer, as does the audience. The evidence of Tóth’s mastery that compels Van Buren to go back to him, hat literally in hand, consists of white-washed chimeras—forlorn dispensations of cubist geometry, flat roofs, and ribbon windows. The glossy composites in the photographs are unmoored, vectoring nothing but the auratic signifier of “Bauhaus,” which, for Corbet and production designer Judy Becker, exists mainly as a shibboleth.

Real Bauhäusler were infatuated with the concept of unity, or the application of an idea that was both internally consistent and outwardly resonant. Ironically, internal consistency evaded the school itself, whose ranks were divided into groupuscules of free-ranging naïfs, four-eyed phenomenologists, Bolshevik agitators, incel spiritualists, and liberated young women with Reality Bites–era Winona Ryder haircuts. Popular with that last set, Marcel Breuer provides the obvious historical analogue for Tóth. Born in Hungary to Jewish parents, he emerged from the Bauhaus fully formed, his talents superior in every appreciable way to those of his mentor-collaborator, Walter Gropius. While a young instructor at Dessau, Breuer (who went by the name Lajkó) developed some of the earliest prototypes for bent-steel furniture, which he successfully licensed to Gebrüder Thonet. When architectural commissions dried up following the Nazi takeover, royalties from sales of the Wassily chair kept him financially afloat. The Van Buren family library that Tóth takes from lugubrious to resplendent is unfurnished but for a single chaise longue with legs like skis. A pastiche of the aluminum recliner that begat Breuer’s famed plywood Isokon chair, it’s fitted with a bookholder for the elder Van Buren, a self-styled intellectual. Across multiple scenes, the chaise remains the focal point of the overly spare room. In an especially blunt moment of thematic telegraphing, a crackly snippet of David Ben-Gurion’s declaration of Israel’s independence plays over a scene of metalworkers bending the tubular steel to make Tóth’s Breuer dupes.

The ecumenical fervor that animated the Bauhaus—particularly in its socialistic-to-communistic phases—has no place in the dour post-Shoah world of The Brutalist. Nor does Breuer’s character-defining sensualism. Here is how a student of his at Harvard, where he was appointed professor in 1936 after emigrating from Europe, described the interior of his Cambridge apartment:

Tóth’s sensualism, crushed beneath the overbearing touchstones of the plot, peeks through in the film’s transitional moments. He and his cousin Attila celebrate their luck in landing the library job with a boozy night of frivolity that resurfaces familial resentments after Attila coerces Tóth to dance with his shiksa wife Audrey. At a jazz club, Tóth and a friend drift into a heroin-abetted spiral that likewise ends in acrimony—this time, with a bouncer socking the strung-out architect. The two sequences offer glimmers of his life before the concentration camp. One imagines a younger Tóth capering at the notorious costume parties thrown at the Bauhaus, described with coruscating detail by the Hungarian Farkas Molnár, a Gropius apprentice whose time at the Weimar iteration of the school overlapped with Breuer’s own:

THAT SOUNDS MORE LIKE a scene out of Megalopolis, whose delirious New Rome is suffused with a peculiar, confident madness. Under the sign of a fable, the film enfolds the viewer in a visual field of overlapping matrices, spolia accruing with quantum indeterminacy. The skies are caught between Cole’s Consummation and Destruction. Figure overwhelms ground, the gridiron sucked into a vortex. It’s a city that never buries its bodies—Columbiana, Trumpiana, Mansardiana, Miesiana, funorama, Futurama, Barnumania, Bicentennial, Beaux-Arts, SPQR, Second Third Fourth Rome, Romanesque, ferroconcrete—until a decrepit spawn of Sputnik plummets to earth, making impact somewhere around Hudson Yards. One utopian dream gives way to another: Catilina’s fresh totality. Megalon, the Topological Core architecture that he has conceived for the grand projet, collapses the organicist metaphor that underpins a century and a half of urban theorizing, imagining a garden city with the metabolic make up of an actual garden. Towers sprout with the profligacy of trumpet royales, their lamellae the closest thing to articulation. The phase-shifting Megalon webs and arboresces, spores and soars, breathes and heaves. It earns him a Nobel Prize.

But for all the motile variegation of this Radiant City Redux, whose guiding principle appears to be that form follows fungus, New Rome’s new lung is about as stimulating as a screensaver. It doesn’t live up to the hype. It’s not just that its primary unit of construction—monads of molecular-modulated polymers or whatever—is untested, thus unsafe, or even that the magical substance will deprive succor to the graft of the trades. Its “nature-centric” vision refuses a quiddity of our existence: Nature isn’t human. We aren’t completely natural. When Cicero’s political hetman Nush Berman (Dustin Hoffman) challenges Megalon’s suitability as a building material and thunders “Concrete, concrete, concrete, steel, steel, steel,” he sounds like an aged foreman entering late-stage dementia. But we get what he means.

Perhaps, pace Catilina, humans weren’t made to thrive in the fructifying soil of Megalopolis after all. To design this vegan topos, Coppola consulted the futurist Neri Oxman, who is credited as a “scientific advisor” in the film’s credits. The studies Oxman produced for the film are more Ozymandias than Oz. The anthropocenic prosody of the accompanying project text—evidently obtuse to the plot of Coppola’s film or its Promethean thrust—prefigures a distant Eden in which “the working relationships between different life-forms have taken an active turn and evolved into kinship.” Over the course of centuries, the hard, four-square city buckles under the strain of climate calamity, eventually succumbing to the lecherous advances of “an underground web of synthetic optical fibers and natural root systems” and initiating a prolonged period of accelerated decomposition. By 2400, all that’s left is a giant compost heap leaching cyber-psilocybinic fumes that will enrich the next stage of humankind. There’s almost a Spenglerian sweep to this bullshit auguring, a kooky elegance in its diagramming of the eschaton. But catastrophizing, alien to the mushroom, can be damning. It’s readily apparent that Oxman, formerly of MIT’s Media Lab and the spouse of hedge-fund nimrod Bill Ackman, takes some pleasure in it. From the standpoint of the elect, mulch is other people.

AT AN EARLY SCREENING of The Brutalist at the Museum of Modern Art in mid-December, director Brady Corbet admitted that “there’s only about ten minutes of Brutalism in the whole film.” In truth, there’s even less than that. Tóth’s opus, a community center for Doylestown commissioned by his patron Van Buren, remains a phantom until the dwindling minutes of the running time. As a structuring absence, it serves the story fine, but spatially it’s incomprehensible. This need not be an undesirable effect in a movie about “the relationship between postwar psychology and postwar architecture,” as Mona Fastvold, Corbet’s collaborator, told The New York Times. But making that isomorphism stick would have required at least some genuine curiosity about its purported inspiration. Instead, Becker, the movie’s production designer, conjures in the Van Buren Institute the ponderous minimalism of Tadao Ando and Peter Zumthor, designing Tóth’s building to be a lumbering monument to the ineffable as defined by self-styled ascetics in the pay of billionaires. Robustness of purpose not beatific calm, cognizance of the times not enmeshment in the eternal, were on the minds of Brutalism’s initial exponents. Angst was a primordial current but so, too, were convictions to the beautiful and the reparative. As such, Brutalism does not quite tell on itself in the way Corbet and Fastvold presume.

At MoMA, Corbet said he sought out the late architectural historian Jean-Louis Cohen (“like having dinner with a human Wikipedia”) for his opinion on Tóth’s immigration story. “He couldn’t think of any European architect who went through an experience like it,” Corbet recalled, and with the instincts of a storyteller, he took this as a good omen.

A closer engagement with the inter- and postwar trajectories of European-born modernists could have furnished the screenwriters with any number of parallel careers to refine their scenario. One might even choose to fill in Tóth’s biography with beats lifted from Molnár’s. A participant in the crushed Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, he repatriated a decade later to head up the national section of the Congress of Modern Architecture. Although he managed to build some during Hungary’s reactionary Nationalist Christian period—including a remarkable municipal hospital done in the Neue Sachlichkeit style—his history of political activity stymied his career, which came to an end after an errant shell exploded on the roof of Molnár’s apartment building during the siege of Budapest, killing him.

Or perhaps the course of displacement might have been reversed, with Tóth trailing either former Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer to the Soviet Union, then embarking on the First Five Year Plan, or Mayer’s protégé Arieh Sharon to Palestine, where he set about synthesizing the Bauhaus with the kibbutz. Had Tóth followed Sharon into the desert from the beginning, and only then resolved to immigrate to the United States, his arc would have mirrored that of Erich Mendelsohn, who immigrated to the UK after the Judenboykott before relocating his design practice to Jerusalem. “What compels us to live in the north?” he wrote in a letter to his wife, still in England. “Isn’t our place here—is not Palestine the only island for 18 million, their origin and historical destination?” He died in San Francisco in 1953, twelve years after taking up residence in California. Perhaps Tóth would have shared Mendelsohn and Sharon’s aversion to the fitfully modern vernacular—what the historian Zvi Efrat calls “Bauhaus colonial”—adopted by the mythical builders of Tel Aviv.

Or Fastvold and Corbet could have backdated Tóth’s journey to the 1930s to align with Breuer’s transatlantic carriage (including an extensive pit stop in Britain). Or they orchestrated a meeting with Gropius or even Breuer himself once Tóth landed on US soil, which would have given some idea of the mutual aid network set up by continental architects escaping Hitler. While they were at it, they might have avoided stacking the narrative deck against Tóth, removing at least one overdetermining trauma in the litany he’s made to endure—survivor’s guilt, family estrangement, starvation, poverty, addiction, rape. But by what entitlement does the architecture critic become the script doctor?

THE RIGORS OF accuracy rarely serve the ends of drama; every movie about architecture is bound to get it wrong. The design critic Mark Lamster, writing in the Dallas Morning News, caviled that neither movie “reflect[s] the way we think about architecture and urban planning today.” Lamster’s complaints extended beyond his professional remit, as when he quipped that Megalopolis’s cinematography didn’t rise above the aesthetic level of a fragrance ad.

The ribbing from the industry trade press was much worse. Hollywood hated Megalopolis long before it made its way to theaters—a journey, as the eighty-five-year-old Coppola tells it, that began in the 1980s. Initially conceived as “a Roman epic set in modern America,” the treatment was subjected to unending rewrites and neurotic embellishments. In the interim, the director built a profitable wine business and cobbled together a real estate portfolio that put him beyond the reach of the studio system. (For all of Megalopolis’s bombastic naïveté, Coppola’s pursuits are still more adult than those of his erstwhile New Hollywood buddies, man-children frightened of sex who made their fortunes by licensing toys.) That he reportedly sank $120 million into a project fated to fail would only seem to accrue to his reputation as a nonconformist. (He has been candid about the “very useful” tax mechanisms available to people of his rank.) Flattering to Coppola as this narrative may be, it is true that his track record of financing his own projects has always rubbed industry types the wrong way. As did, evidently, Megalopolis’s stilted dialogue and pendulous performances, their estranging effect enhanced by the director’s decision to leave visible the pentimenti of passing crotchets and dashed plot lines. The movie was shut out of this year’s Oscars and jeered by the Razzies, which bestowed on Coppola the honor of Worst Director. Corbett, meanwhile, made The Brutalist, a film seething with aspiration and nominated for ten Oscars, for just $10 million. “Every dollar is up there on the screen,” the MoMA film programmer said, by way of introducing Corbet, who flinched a little at the mention of money.

Nearly a half century separates Coppola and Corbet in age, if not ambition. In recovering the archetype of the insuperable, bureaucracy-battling Übermensch popular during this country’s putative heyday, Coppola and Corbett also strive to make grand statements about America’s past and future. In The Brutalist, blast furnaces and other galvanic signifiers of the gross domestic product are depicted in newsreel inserts with voiceovers that announce the geopolitical exigencies surrounding Tóth’s arrival in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. “The land of decision,” the disembodied voice roared, a month after Election Day. (Bellowing “Concrete, concrete, concrete, steel, steel, steel” like Nush Berman would have been more subtle.) In Megalopolis’s New Rome, a world-city in disrepair, where civilizational breakdown is signposted by allegorical figures that come alive only to fall apart, oligarchs of the incestuous rivaling clans, the Crassus-Catilinas and the Ciceros, guarantee civilian rule against bureaucratic overreach. Whatever its faults, Coppola’s belabored parable of late-stage empire is honest about democracy’s tendency to ossify into dynastic blocs and infantile in its regard for redemption stories, which is a way of saying it’s proudly American. Corbet has claimed that The Brutalist is about immigration, a realist’s view of America the Brutiful. But this realism becomes indistinguishable from cynicism, which not only assumes but demands the worst.

The action in its first half rises as Tóth is given the Doylestown institute commission by Van Buren, who wants to dedicate the facility to his deceased mother. He monopolizes the architect’s time, posting him up in a guesthouse on his large bucolic property. Public buy-in for the project is predicated on the relinquishing of its secular character; at a town hall, an attendee registers an uneasiness about Tóth’s presence that scans as antisemitism. Van Buren stipulates that in addition to a chapel and library there should be a gymnasium. Three incommensurable activities housed within the same building—a challenge, the younger Van Buren (Joe Alwyn) goads Tóth.

He does not meet it. Instead, under pains so grandiose and unrelenting they could only be divinely rendered, or self-inflicted, his life unravels for a second time. Not even the arrival of his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), from whom he was separated during the Nazi occupation of Hungary, lifts his lugubrious spell. Failing to consummate the reunion, Brody’s Tóth purses his face into a death mask, seeming to regret this spousal incursion on his artistic autonomy. (At the center of Megalopolis’s decadence also lies the nuclear household, which conforms to normative expectations except when it broaches drag play, the incest taboo, and matricidal ideation. Coppola, a traditionalist in his consistent affirmations of la famiglia, doesn’t jealously guard his hobbyhorses.) Blind ambition imperils Tóth’s commitments to Erzsébet and his niece, Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), and exacerbates his relationship with Van Buren, to whom he has unwisely entrusted the well-being of his kin. Zsófia, made mute by her wartime experiences, regains her speech after finding the Zionist cause in New York, where Tóth moves the family after work on the Van Buren Institute is derailed by the needs of the plot. She informs her uncle and convert aunt that she and her new husband are planning to “repatriate” and insist that they follow suit; it is their duty as Jews to settle the young state. Tóth and Erzsébet recoil from the suggestion. Having been recalled by Van Buren, László announces that his duty lies on a decapitated hill in Nowheresville, Pennsylvania. His woes—Corbet’s Pietóth, if you will—ultimately become Erzsébet’s, and the conclusion of the film positions Israel as their path back to wholeness. In an epilogue set amid a retrospective of Tóth’s career at the inaugural Venice Architectural Biennale of 1980, the middle-aged Zsófia, now speaking on behalf of a mute and enfeebled Tóth, muscularly declares to the crowd huddled inside the Israeli Pavilion, “It is the destination, not the journey.” Whether the scene is keyed into irony or affirmation depends on one’s persuasions. This all too convenient handling of Zionism makes complaints about The Brutalist’s erroneous architectural representations appear trifling by comparison.

The production team’s deployment of AI to fill in the architectural content of the epilogue is, likewise, a minor sin chalkable to the movie’s meager budget. It’s the destination that matters. The Van Buren Institute, Zsófia reveals to the audience on- and off-screen, was a Holocaust memorial all along, a condemnation of Golgotha’s self-celebration by way of Buchenwald. The suggestion—that architecture need aspire to the status of a sepulchral art—is not alien to the unreconstructed classicists calling on Trump to prosecute his creed to make federal civic buildings beautiful again. They vie for monopoly over the president’s limited object permanence with billionaires who would see themselves in Neri Oxman’s Megalopolis, its assertion of a design superintelligence obfuscating mass extermination. When the measure of architecture is the tomb and the monument, nothing is left for the living.