Before October 7, 2023, The Brutalist would have been one of those very smart, very subtle, beautifully made movies that have had approximately zero impact on the wider world.
As it turns out, the three-hour-and-35-minute film—which stars Adrien Brody as László Tóth, a talented yet utterly depleted Hungarian Jewish architect who has just arrived in America in the year 1947—is hugely consequential.
It is not just that The Brutalist, which premiered in September 2024, is expected to snap up Best Picture at Sunday’s Oscars, and that Brody is up for Best Actor, and that, with a paltry $10 million budget, it reeled in more than $36 million at the box office.
It’s that The Brutalist dares to ask a question that would have been unfathomable to most American Jews before Hamas attacked Israel and, more importantly, before that attack was met with exuberance by much of progressive America.
The question is: Do American Jews belong in America? Or have we deluded ourselves into believing that this is our home? Viewed through the prism of right now, the story of László Tóth, which mostly takes place in the 1940s and 1950s, is remarkably—painfully—prescient.