I've read a number of reviews afer watching this film, but none so far consider the possibility that the hagiographic narrative of Toth's life (and especially his trojan horse strategy of building a monument to his postwar trauma) is a fabrication and/or a convenient rationalisation for his pretty shitty behaviour both shown and implied. I don't believe this is too much of a stretch to read it in this way, and indeed I am almost certain that the director is leaving this possible interpretation for the audience to choose from. Who knows, perhaps it's just too impolitic in the current moment to suggest that a Holocaust survivor might exploit their grief? Either way, I've seen and read many artistic retrospectives of this kind (although admittedly none of an architect), and it invariably turns out that they have been sanitised at best.
The film is so gripping moment to moment that it’s almost convincing in its determination to be a definitive American epic. There’s also more than a hint of 21st-century Paul Thomas Anderson here, especially in the mix of grandiosity and willful eccentricity that defined There Will Be Blood and The Master. But whereas those films replaced the traditional masculinist angst of seventies Hollywood movies with a free-floating (but still male-centric) anxiety that set history off its hinges—critiques of men’s control over the flow of American power—Corbet’s film, with its surprising music cues and percussive visual flourishes, marries them to the narrative of a man who’s less antihero than underdog.[…]
The curious tonal shifts of The Brutalist are never clearer than in its second half, when the film goes obstinately askew, leaving behind the first movement’s trudging, cause-and-effect realism for a heightened, not entirely persuasive symbolism. Among the forbidding quarries of Carrara in central Italy, where Toth has taken Van Buren to scout the world’s finest marble, a shocking, left-field act of violence reconfigures the film into the realm of metaphor.
— Michael Koresky (Reverse Shot)
Synopsis: Escaping post-war Europe, visionary architect László Toth arrives in America to rebuild his life, his work, and his marriage to his wife Erzsébet after being forced apart during wartime by shifting borders and regimes. On his own in a strange new country, László settles in Pennsylvania, where the wealthy and prominent industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren recognizes his talent for building. But power and legacy come at a heavy cost.