“EMPATHY” — YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG: Adrien Brody hopes The Brutalist ‘reawakens empathy for immigrants.’
Adrien Brody said he hopes his new film The Brutalist can “reawaken” empathy for immigrants.
The Oscar-tipped drama focusses on Brody’s Hungarian-Jewish architect László Tóth, a Holocaust survivor who emigrates to the United States.
Brody, 51, said he took inspiration for the role from his mother, the photographer Sylvia Plachy, whose family emigrated to the United States from Budapest in 1958 after the Hungarian Revolution.
“I witnessed my own mother’s journey, how she and her parents fled terrible circumstances only to enter a harsh new reality of being foreigners,” he told the Sunday Times.
“They had the obstacles of assimilation. But most of us in the US have come from such a past – second generation, third generation. So it is incongruous that there can be apathy towards people’s yearning to come over and be a contributing part of my nation.
“I hope this reawakens empathy for immigrants.”
Judging by the reviews of the three hour, 35 minute film, it doesn’t sound like its screenwriters carry around much empathy for America itself in their hearts: The Brutalist: The Raw Concrete of America.
The story follows the fortunes of the Hungarian architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) after he flees the aftermath of the Holocaust in Europe to seek his freedom in the United States…Tóth settles with his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), a furniture-maker in Philadelphia, who is enslaved by his desire to assimilate: He marries a shiksa, he becomes Catholic, he even changes his Hungarian surname to Miller. Tóth regards him with contempt. Soon, he encounters the wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), an ersatz Charles Foster Kane, who is of course enslaved to his own money, but also to a driving desire to be thought of as a serious, intellectual man. Van Buren, in turn, enslaves Tóth, all but forcing him to design and build a large, self-consciously modern community center in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. And of course, Tóth enslaves himself, first to drugs to numb his despair, and then to despair itself, as he comes to see his American experience as little more than an extension of his detainment in the concentration camps.
In case anyone in the audience isn’t tracking with the brutality of it all, Corbet helpfully includes a scene where Van Buren rapes a drunken Tóth while making antisemitic observations about the causes of the Holocaust. (Yes, yes, we get it—America has raped the world….) And in case that brainy symbol isn’t clear enough, shortly after, he restates the film’s thesis in the mouth of Erzsébet, who declares to her dejected husband, “You were right, this place is rotten. The landscape, the food we eat—this whole country is rotten.” And so it goes until the very end, when Corbet unveils his final exhibit: At the first Venice Biennale, Tóth’s niece reveals in a speech that his forced labor for Van Buren was really just an extension of his Holocaust experience, that what his patron has intended as a monument to a modern, forward-looking America was in fact a re-envisioning of the death houses at Buchenwald.
As Charlie Kirk was quoted as saying, “America is the only country where even those who hate it refuse to leave. That’s how you know you live in a great country.”
