Transcript

Rebecca Pierce: Hello and welcome back to On the Nose, the Jewish Currents podcast. My name is Rebecca Pierce. I’m a contributing writer at Jewish Currents and I will be guest hosting this week. Today, we’ll be discussing the Oscar-nominated film The Brutalist, which traces the life and career of fictional architect and Holocaust survivor László Tóth. The film follows Tóth, played by Adrien Brody, from his early days as a recent immigrant through his family reunification with his wife, Erzsébet, and niece, Zsófia, and his tumultuous relationship with the wealthy Pennsylvania industrialist, Harrison Van Buren. The Brutalist is currently nominated for 10 Academy Awards and is considered a frontrunner for Best Picture. The film has faced controversy for its on-screen references to Israel and Zionism while supporting actor Guy Pearce notably showed solidarity with Gaza during the film’s promotion. To discuss The Brutalist, we’re joined by Jewish Currents associate editor Mari Cohen, contributing editor Siddhartha Mahanta, and contributor Noah Kulwin. This conversation includes spoilers for the film and discussions of on-screen depictions of sexual violence. So, I guess the topic on a lot of people’s minds right now when it comes to this film is this seemingly shoehorned-in references to Israel and Zionism. Noah, I know you’ve already written about this. I’m curious: What are your thoughts on what is this doing in this particular film?

Noah Kulwin: Sure. For context. I wrote an article for Screen Slate, the movie website, that came out in early January. And the focus of my piece was about Israel and the way in which Israel is used as an idea and as a real thing within the story of the movie. I found Israel and Zionism within the scope of this movie to be like Chekhov’s plot device. It was very ostentatiously introduced to the audience. It’s name-checked in all of these very interesting, rather multimedia ways, which is very striking in a movie that is as proudly analog as it gets these days. And my feeling was that it showed all of these things, but then, it didn’t actually do anything with them. The movie itself didn’t really make much of an argument, which is fine as far as that goes, but it really didn’t say much of anything, not even an argument. There wasn’t even a statement or, I thought, really a visceral depiction that brought to life these ideals that it talks about of a Jewish homeland and what it means. It just didn’t feel, to me, particularly complete. The movie goes to great lengths to talk about and show the ways in which Israel can mean something to the characters of this movie, but what Israel is and what the movie thinks Israel is or what Zionism is, is actually completely left below the surface.

RP: Mari and Sid, I really want to hear, what are your thoughts on all of this?

Mari Cohen: Yeah, I agree. I found Noah’s review really compelling. I mean, I walked out of the theater thinking that Israel really felt like it had been used in the movie as like, a broad-based idea of a solution. It’s really, I think, presented as the idea of the solution to American antisemitism. Over the course of this movie, you see the disillusionment of the idea that America could be a place for a second chance for a Jewish Holocaust survivor. You have Van Buren literally saying, obviously, in a very intense moment: We’ll never understand you, we’ll never accept you. You’ll always be the racialized other, we’ll always think of you as poor scoundrels, and you don’t really have a home here. And Israel is presented as this supposed light at the end of the tunnel that could offer a different way. And then you’ve got Zsófia wanting to emigrate there, and you’ve got Erzsébet being interested in that and wanting to feel this idea that perhaps you could feel more empowered in the Jewish state. A lot of it is unsaid, but I think it’s the subtext of the idea of them being interested and moving.

MC: That was my initial thought leaving the movie, which I still think is mostly how Israel is used as a device. I think the real question is whether the movie is actually trying to criticize that in some way as well. Just thinking about the epilogue and the way that Zsófia reinterprets László’s work as this really Jewish identity-focused work, and that fits into this narrative around Holocaust and antisemitism and whether that’s actually what he meant to do, or whether it has something to do with the way that all work gets reinterpreted in this narrative, depending on who the survivors are and who has the voice. So, I think that’s interesting, and I don’t know exactly, but I felt like, on its surface at least, the movie is presenting a pretty straightforward American Judeo-pessimist narrative and Israel as some straightforward solution.

Siddhartha Mahanta: Yeah. I do think one could make a very strong argument that this feels deliberately structured to be a piece of Zionist propaganda. I do think these broader questions around the supposed impossibility of assimilation, and László’s relationship with Van Buren as one of deception, exploitation, of a very clear, literal sense of appropriation of László’s life story, of his skill, of his talents, and also the exploitation of a man who survived the most unimaginable of traumas—taking a man at his weakest point when he’s also in the throes of drug addiction, as the movie hammers home repeatedly. I think looking at it from this lens of what it’s trying to say about the other, or the foreigner, or the immigrant deceptively sucked into the maw of Americana or something—you get the sense that the movie is this cautionary tale of this story of the post-war American immigration or refugee story. I guess on some level, if you mute or turn down the volume on what Brady Corbet seemed to be wanting to say about Israel and about Zionism, then you can, to my mind, you can see it as this very provocative and, I would say, somewhat unprecedented movie about assimilation, and about how maybe, this country never really had a tradition for that acceptance.

RP: I feel pretty similarly. I felt like there was a really big disconnect between the first act of the film and the second act of the film in that regard, where we have this few minutes of a speech by Ben Gurion at one point, during this period where László was building something new. I think it’s like a Barcelona chair or something, a piece of Bauhaus furniture, and it’s contrasted with this speech about the Jewish state. But the rest of it is really this very stark exploration of how difficult it was to assimilate. Your enemy is not just the system; it’s other Jewish people not accepting you. I thought that that was something I haven’t seen in a lot of films, where László’s cousin, Attila, takes him in at one point. He’s married to a Catholic woman, and then, eventually, puts him out at her behest, and he goes through this whole cycle of being an outcast, being completely on the outside. And that was so contrasted with what ends up happening in the next act. And it’s so detailed. Like, there’s so much texture and so much these different vignettes and moments that show that, and then, when we get to the second act, when we’re dealing with Israel, everything happens off-screen. There is no on-screen depiction of Israel. So, it is just this idea and it’s very hollow compared to how rich the rest of the text seems to be.

NK: Yeah, I mean, I’m a pretty big believer in reading images as they’re presented to you. I think that there are not many times when this movie is letting you know what it thinks of what its characters are doing in a really cool way. And it saves, in fact, a lot of its artistry for fairly aggressively ambiguous portrayals of people. In this moment though, we get Adrien Brody with like, sparks flying. It’s literally the image used for the poster. And what we hear is Ben Gurion delivering—you can use context clues to figure out the time, that it’s right after the UN voted to accept partition. Now, if somebody wants to go open up the New York Times from that day and reflect on how other people and how the world understood partition at that moment, there’s an actual on-the-record quote from Junim Magnus, an anachronistic one-state Zionist of the time saying; Oh, this is good. This is a bloodbath if the Jews take this up seriously. Just to give a sense, though, of what is presented as this moment of triumphalism, I think, with layering that on and then, in the narrative later on, in presenting Israel as, essentially, this valorized escape hatch for wayward European-turned-American Jews—I think, for me, it was like this peek under the hood of Ben Gurion saying: We’ve now got a nation, and we’ve got to build it. And just like a bit of an aggressive abnegation of the actual historical. It feels to me like an evacuation of the actual historical content of what the images and the facts and the sounds and the things it’s presenting are. And that, to me, felt a little grimy. It had the sheen of an ideal in a movie that’s supposed to be critiquing an ideal, or offering criticism of an ideal.

SM: I mean, I do think this idea of presenting the trauma of trying to rebuild and recreate oneself after the Holocaust, the very cinematic rendering of the scene that we’re talking about, all these tantalizing elements about what Israel is beginning to mean for someone like Tóth, are super compelling, just cinematically. I did remember feeling like overlaying the Ben Gurion speech while László is being told by—I believe it’s his cousin’s wife, in that moment, that this really remarkable piece of brutalist-style furniture that he has made, she tells him something about this piece not fitting, or it’ll never really have a place. That’s one of the clearest moments, to me, where you could read it either as just this commentary on what László is about to experience as somebody trying to rebuild his life in America, or, as I think, in some sense, reifying or reinforcing, I guess, the subtext of Ben Gurion’s speech. So that ambiguity, I think, is something that the movie is not entirely productive about.

NK: And I’d like to just add something quickly to what Sid said. So when I saw the movie, I had the very good fortune to see it opening weekend in New York City at the Village East, and Brady Corbet and his wife, Mona Fastvold, who co-wrote the film—although Corbet is credited as sole director—they gave a Q&A after the movie. And the entirety of the Q&A, I’ve got to say, was pretty much about the aesthetics. It was about how it is that they achieved the look of this. I mean, aesthetics—I’m being a little overly broad there. He talks about shooting the movie. There was some interesting commentary about how the $10 million budget number has been marketed very aggressively, which I had some sympathy for because it’s overtaken discussions of the content of the movie itself in many respects. But when it did get to this moment where he and Fastvold addressed this question of ambiguity, of a cultivated ambiguity in the movie, he talks about how cultivated it was; how they don’t want to tell anybody how to think about this, and he even brought up the idea of it being something that you argue about in the car or on the train home with the person that you just saw it with. So I just, as speaking as the person who heard the artist say this to the crowd, I have pretty deliberately tried not to draw too much authorial intent into a lot of this stuff, or to try and say that it’s supposed to make you think one thing and instead to try and accept it. Like all right: Here’s this really ambiguous film. Here’s this movie they made to be ambiguous. They’re saying it’s ambiguous, yet there’s a lot of stuff in this movie that is not ambiguous. And I have felt overburdened by the idea that the movie should be viewed through that. I feel like the framing or the idea that this was an ambiguous work—it’s not capacious enough, in my view, to get away with that. It doesn’t have enough meat in it or enough things that contradict another, or counterbalancing polarities, or whatever to make that ambiguousness feel there. It just feels like a morass. And I suppose that you could argue that that’s supposed to be mapped onto this immigrant experience, this conflicted immigrant experience and success story at the core of it. But that ambiguity encountered me as listlessness by the end of it. I wasn’t bored during it, but I didn’t feel the ambiguity produced something all that interesting in me.

MC: Yeah. I don’t know for me how much that has to do with the fact that this topic has such an overdetermined nature to it and that I spend so much of my time immersed these narratives about the Holocaust, and antisemitism, and American antisemitism, and Zionism that it’s hard for me to not have some level of cynicism in approaching that. But what I also found interesting about this movie is that the historical narrative that it’s presenting, which is the idea of a Holocaust survivor basically coming to the United States and then finding assimilation so challenging in a country so profoundly racist or unwelcoming that Israel becomes this potentially alternative, attractive option. Although I think, to László himself, it never actually is necessarily as attractive as to his niece or wife, which is also interesting. But it’s not actually a very common historical narrative. Like, when you think about American histories and histories of American Zionism, it’s really like you have the Holocaust, refugees who can get into the United States often will come to the United States already very established American Jewish community. People here to receive them, various structures. And then, obviously, a lot of people are not let into the United States. There’s still these earlier xenophobic immigration restrictions that keep people out, and they’re not lifted for a while. And so, a lot of Holocaust survivors do go to Israel because it’s what’s available to them.

MC: But the idea that it’s very common for people to move to the US as a Jewish refugee and then not stay and move to Israel instead is actually really not a very common narrative. I mean, it’s very common that these American Jews get invested in Israel and really invested in Zionism; that they’re traveling to Israel, they’re spending time there, they’re going to Israel parades, especially after 1967. But the real challenge actually has always been that Zionism has never captured as many Americans to actually move to Israel and make aliyah as they’ve wanted to because so many Jews have actually been relatively comfortable in the United States and have found it relatively welcoming. And basically until 1967, several major American Jewish organizations wouldn’t actually define themselves as Zionist, not because they weren’t pro-Israel but because they thought that Zionist meant that you had to move to Israel, and they didn’t want to move to Israel because they were very invested in Americanness. And so, there’s just always been this real tension about the idea of Americans moving en masse to Israel. I mean, it’s interesting right now. I do think there’s probably a resurgence, just in terms of this general resurgence of Zionist sentiments among American Jews post-October 7. But I just find in some ways this narrative idiosyncratic or ahistorical in that sense. And it’s interesting for me to think about where that comes from. I don’t know if this is Corbet’s idea of what an American Jew facing racism in that era would grapple with. It struck me as a little bit strange.

NK: You really put your finger on a button that this movie pressed for me, was that I kept saying: This isn’t that common of an experience. This is a fairly unusual thing that it’s depicting, that a family of immigrant Jews that escaped Hungary finds New York City unbearably antisemitic. Like my napkin theory of this, having seen his previous two movies—The Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux—and Corbet’s own resume is that Corbet is very clearly inspired by and has primarily European collaborators. The co-author of this movie, of this screenplay, is his wife who is Norwegian. And The Childhood of a Leader is a movie about a future mid-century American authoritarian, but it’s his childhood in World War I during Versailles. And Corbet has worked with literally some of the best European directors, and one of the things that has struck me in his work is that like, if this movie had come out in Europe, I think a lot of this would make sense because that’s how Europeans think of Jews and the Jewish experience in America—as perhaps being like a bit crueler and more punishing than it was in a self-absolving way, I think I would say. But it did strike me that in trying to explain—Why does the movie focus have this fundamental story of an anachronism, of something that cuts so against the dominant historical experience? That also really stuck out to me.

RP: I wonder if part of the contrast with other stories we see is also like, timeline, because a lot of the focus is on the immediate post-war period. László’s coming as an immigrant and trying to assimilate at a time when like there’s this different level of xenophobia still. There’s also anti-communist sentiment coming up. I felt like, as someone who experiences racism in America, there was something very true about László’s experience, actually. This coming with your brilliance into a space, doing these things that people don’t quite understand, being denied payment, being denied recognition, and then later down the line, everyone is on board with it, kind of, but you’re still always told: No, we tolerate you. As the son says at one point, you’re still preyed upon.

RP: There’s that scene when László’s wife first comes, and they’re having dinner with Guy Pearce’s character, and he tells her, “Why does your husband still sound like a shoeshine boy?” And he flicks a nickel at him or something and then takes it back. I felt so much of that really deeply as someone who has racialized experience and has family stories that were really similar. Of course, on the Black side of my family, not the Jewish side of my family, which came to the United States in the 1890s and assimilated much earlier and did not experience this xenophobia. As László’s character actually says: It’s not just about the antisemitism, it’s that I’m a foreigner, that people worry about my presence here. It made a lot of sense to me why he rejected America at the end of that. I think that’s the conclusion that a lot of racialized people come to, but then the solution of being unable to assimilate into the power structures, to go join the power a place where you are the power structure—but we don’t address that, we don’t talk about that, we don’t look at it or ever see it. It’s just this off-screen occurrence of like: Oh, we’re going to Israel now because we want to either follow our family, or it’s our duty, or whatever. So I felt like there was something really generative about 80% of the movie, something really interesting there, and then it just got weird. I rewatched it last night with two friends, and one of them could not separate this from some sort of October 7 apology—which, if you know the timeline of how films are made, that seems a little unlikely to me. But that ambiguity, like you said, Noah, invites that kind of reading and takes away from what I think is a special, interesting exploration of what gets lost in our American historical memory of antisemitism.

SM: One thing that becomes very striking, Rebecca, when you were talking about the scene when Van Buren makes the joke about him sounding like a shoeshine boy and flicks the coin at him. I think on this spectrum of assimilation and thinking of László’s cousin Attila—László is very struck by how Attila has essentially deracinated; how much of his old actual identity he has he has cast aside in order to make it in this country. He presents publicly as a Catholic, but this is actually one of these moments where I feel like Corbet is remarkably unsubtle about the contrast he’s trying to draw out. But there’s this idea that begins to emerge, that is well explored throughout the movie, about shame and humiliation; the shame and humiliation that comes with being forced to cast aside who you really are and where you come from and things like this. I think the fact that by the time of the shoeshine boy scene, László has been so cowed and so debased and really exhausted, perhaps, by this process of trying to be seen as a worthwhile person, let alone a worthwhile artist. And I think if we’re talking about things that are so rarely depicted on screen, I think that was very uncomfortable. I think anybody whose family or heritage traces back to somewhere else within their living memory, I think it’s really a very tough thing to think about.

RP: Yeah, I think that threat of humiliation and domination was, I think, most clearly expressed in this scene after viewing the quarry in Italy—László collapses drunk and is assaulted by Van Buren. And he’s saying, “How can you resent your persecution when you act like a bum,” basically, and calls him a lady of the night and all these things. Watching that scene in the theater, I’ve never seen a depiction of sexual violence against men in that particular way like that. And I’ve never seen a depiction of sexual violence as being racialized against anyone other than Black women on screen in that way. And that was pretty shocking to me. It was an unbearing of the deep extent of the entitlement that coursed through their whole relationship and then, ultimately, defines and breaks it. When I was watching that scene in the theater, a woman behind me laughed, and I was pretty shocked at that. It wasn’t just like, “Oh, I’m uncomfortable laugh.” It was like a straight-up, this-is-funny cackle. And I found that so crazy because this is a movie about a Holocaust survivor. We see all these forms of prejudice, and humiliation, and domination that are treated as sacrosanct in our country, and then when it comes to a sexual assault against a man by another man, it’s like someone thought that was played for laughs.

RP: That really struck me, and it reminded me of something I’d seen when I was younger, which was when Adrien Brody accepted the Academy Award for The Pianist, which was presented to him by Halle Berry. And he pulls her into this kiss on stage in this moment of ecstasy, I guess, that was unplanned. She didn’t know that was gonna happen. But he was—him being at the very apex of American cultural power in this moment, let’s say, winning an Academy Award—he’s been entitled to the body of a Black woman. And I remember feeling so humiliated for her as a child watching that, and it was really striking for me to see that happen again in this movie to a character played by Adrien Brody. And I’m sure there will be no other discussion of this or these parallels in the press for the film. Adrien Brody has since made vague comments of: I never wanted to make anyone feel uncomfortable. It’s good that we’re more sensitive these days. But I was really struck by how the film got at this truth of how, if you are a racialized person in the United States, you and your personhood and your body are available to the powerful in this way. And I haven’t seen that enacted on screen against anyone other than Black women. So it was very interesting to me to see that and then also be like: Wow, that’s the guy who’s playing this character.

NK: One thing about that scene that struck me, and this is not about the rape, but about a character who’s introduced prior to it. Like the stone guide, the stone whisperer, as I called him in my head—that was just a guy they met while filming there.

RP: I loved that character in that scene. So beautifully shot. First of all, they’re going through this Italian marble quarry, looking at the stones, and he’s just waxing poetic about being an anarchist and anti-fascist stone cutter. Talks about dropping blocks of marble on Mussolini’s soldiers back in the day. And I thought that was also this really interesting moment, this reach toward an anti-fascist internationale. Even though we don’t hear László say he’s a communist or an anarchist or anything, there is this throughline where earlier, he’s asked about why he became an architect, and he feels that his buildings will become sites of upheaval in the future if they survive. László Tóth, very notably, befriends a Black immigrant as well, who follows him throughout his life, and there’s this racial solidarity. And then, that’s totally undermined by what happens with Zionism and Israel in this film. It’s like there’s this idea of like, we are part of a larger world of people who are fighting for freedom, and then at the end of the day, the solution is going to Israel.

NK: One thing I wonder about that quote when he’s talking about his buildings being sites of upheaval, and provocations that will endure, and that kind of thing. I think my read of it is more politically neutralist because I think one of the qualities of this character and one of the ways to read this movie is in a pretty deracinated way about it being an artist, and a very fundamental struggle about any person whose like cultural production is the product of patronage is dealing with a cursed fruit. And the rape is the reification of that, not the building. Like the rape comes before the building. We expect to get a building, and instead, we get a rape. And then eventually, when we do get a building, it turns it on its ear a bit because the building is itself a monument to the trauma and to the Holocaust. We learn in the epilogue—that was the secret all along, that they were making a Holocaust memorial. But I am myself more ambivalent about this. But I do feel, it’s like when we’re dealing with László the architect, László the builder, László the visionary and the dreamer, and not László the like, “Where’s my head gonna sleep tonight?” guy. We’re dealing with, not like this Jewish immigrant from Hungary, but at that moment, the character in the hands of this story becomes like an artist with this magic brush. And it’s about the journey that the exploitation can get framed in that way, too. I definitely agree that there is this political imagery and sense of solidarity that’s meant to be conveyed with these characters and with some of these facts. But it just, to me, doesn’t like, totally add up or match with how László is positioned and what we know of his desires and wants.

MC: I feel like we should maybe read the quote or just introduce it.

NK: So, yeah, the quote from the movie, the speech where László gives his credo and a bit of a monologue to Guy Pearce (or Van Buren). He says, “When the terrible recollections of what happened in Europe have ceased to humiliate us, I expect them to serve instead as a political stimulus, sparking the upheavals that so frequently occur in the cycles of peoplehood. I already anticipate a communal rhetoric of anger and fear. A whole river of such frivolities may flow undammed, but my buildings were devised to endure such erosion of the Danube’s shoreline.” And then, by the way, the best part—what to me plays for fucking laughs in the theater, because I genuinely guffawed, was Guy Pearce’s reply, which is “What a poetic reply.”

SM: Well, that’s the thing though. In the context of the movie, I mean, this is the party where Van Buren has begun to realize what a big deal László is and that everything that repulsed him about László, whether it’s his foreignness, his Jewishness, his intellectual artisticness, is actually something that he can use and exploit. Van Buren is hearing all this, and László is very much knowingly performing for Van Buren. I think this is the first time—just as much as this is the first time Van Buren has met a guy like László—for László, I mean, he’s dealt with patrons before. One assumes he’s dealt with this setting before. And I think he knows the game of, “I’m the brilliant artist and basically, I know this scene of rich elites want to hear my stories and eventually, cut me the check so I can make the stuff.” I think reading this monologue and hearing it again, I was like, “Oh, this is László knowing his story, his thesis for his work, and how it emerges from him and his experience. Thinking about it now, I’m almost like, “Oh, he’d been waiting for the moment to—this might sound awful—but ham it up in this way. And for him, it’s this first big articulation of his manifesto, and I think, unknowingly, this was the moment perhaps when Van Buren actually figured out how he could really fully use, and exploit, ultimately try to destroy this man.

MC: I think that this quote in general is just so interesting, and I’ve been puzzling over it, but just to quickly thread back in the sexual assault scene. Rebecca, I found your analysis really compelling and useful because I had been a little skeptical about that scene. I mean, I thought the Italian quarry scene was amazing. Loved the character. I think the assault itself felt a little bit on the nose or somewhat surprising for the tone of the movie so far that really had played in this ambiguity, although not always. I mean, you really do have Harry saying, “We tolerate you,” so it’s not like it was ever played so muted. But this really does explode it to another degree. And I guess that threw me off a little bit. And I do wonder if it’s because my sense of this the way the movie’s playing, this relationship between somebody like Van Buren and an immigrant like László, is that there is this idea of the US WASPy relationship compared to the relationship with more racialized Jews or white ethnics, about this interplay of ambiguities and slights and discomfort. But the more naked domination, or the more like, overt domination that you’re talking about that we’ve seen more often on-screen in relationship to how it’s been experienced by Black Americans and Black women, I’m just not convinced is as accurate a representation of this type of relationship, or I wonder what it means to borrow from that history and put it in this context, in which I found, at least, the version of it where there’s this very uncomfortable alliance to be more accurate to this actual history of what somebody like László might experience than this much more obvious domination, assault, outright racist diatribe. And so that took me out of things a little bit. I was a little bit skeptical of its use.

NK: One thing I would add is that I think it’s not insignificant that the rape takes place in a mine. It’s been repurposed. They’re having a party, but it’s a mine, and it’s a site of exploitation. The meaning that’s being generated by the movie felt loud and clear coming through to me. One question that I had that I wanted to pose for the group about this was how they felt about László’s wife as a character, if not specifically the performance. Because I think it’s pretty interesting that this is not a movie with many characters, and we’ve brought up pretty much everybody but—except in explaining plot details—Erzsébet, his wife, and his niece, Zsófia.

RP: Well, you do spend a lot of the film waiting for her, literally. And then you spend a lot of the rest of the film waiting for her to do something. And then she does do something. there’s this scene where László’s wife, Erzsébet, is in incredible pain because she has osteoporosis due to starvation from the war. When she arrives, she’s in a wheelchair, which she did not let László know. That’s a point of tension for them. And later, he uses his stash of heroin to treat one of her chronic pain attacks and, at some point, reveals to her that he has been sexually assaulted. She later, in the only scene where we see her out of a wheelchair, confronts Van Buren in front of his whole family at dinner with a walker, is then knocked over and dragged out. And I was surprised by it. I found it a little out of character from what we’d seen of her and very melodramatic, to the point that it was totally off with the rest of the film. I really was rooting for her character to do something interesting, which she did do something interesting, but that was where the second act of the film fell off for me in terms of believability, even more so than the other things we’ve discussed. And just like having her be in a wheelchair the whole script with no reference to her ever using other assistive devices, and in that scene she’s standing up, it’s like—okay, so this disability is about the symbolism in the film and not this character, which I think is weak for a lot of reasons.

MC: I also just felt there was a bit of an element of a male fantasy character with her, particularly in that she actually—perhaps unlike that traditional archetype—she’s quite assertive and obviously super smart, very self-sufficient. I mean, really, even before that final confrontation scene, there’s a lot of examples of her integrating with the Van Burens but in a somewhat skeptical way, standing up for herself. I think there’s a scene where Van Buren gives her and Zsófia a ride, and she’s teasing him or making fun of his pretension, or his desire to be more creative or artistic when he’s actually kind of a hack. And so, she obviously has this empowerment, but it’s never directed at László, and instead, toward him, she’s this well of endless patience and also hypersexual energy, really, to the extent that in a very overt scene—it’s interesting, but her Holocaust trauma or longing has been translated into this sexual longing toward him, which I actually think is an interesting thing to explore. I’m not discounting that as something that could happen or be real, but just like, there is a real, fantasized element in that toward her husband, who is quite difficult, is spending all their money on this project. He wants her to come, but he’s not really thinking about her place in his life or their world, and she’s like an endless patience, endless sexual interest, endless forgiveness for any of his transgressions. And so, I found her character a little bit challenging in that regard.

SM: Yeah, I’d say the version of László that exists in her mind when she actually does come to the movie is the idealized fantasy of him that may have existed before the Holocaust when they were living the prime of their life. When he was the talk of the town in Hungary and when she was foreign correspondent. The two things I remember about her from the movie are, of course, her confrontation with Van Buren but also the repeated recounting of her dreams. These sexually idealized dreams of László that she more or less says, I think, kept her alive and gave her the desire and the motivation to go on. I think, in a movie where more of her experiences had been actually depicted in some way, I think maybe there could have been a more rounded sense of her. I do think, to Felicity Jones’ credit, I do think she makes the most of very limited material, but I don’t think she can overcome—there’s almost this obsessive energy about a certain idea of László that by that point in the movie, just to me personally, was not what I was hoping from this character that, I think Rebecca pointed out, we’ve been waiting the entire time to meet.

SM: I guess one other prominent thing that I wanted that I’m really actually curious to hear what you all think about that like, is not like super dealt with. In most of the reviews I’ve read about the movie are its treatment of drug abuse and of heroin in particular. It’s perhaps second to Jewishness and questions of assimilation and immigration. Heroin is possibly the most prominent and important element in the movie. It does almost have this almost magical resonance toward the end of the movie when Erzsébet is experiencing great, great pain. László uses some of this heroin to help ease her pain, and she has an overdose from which she does recover, but it is the moment that does lead her to believe and feel strongly that, I believe as she puts it, America is a rotten place and that they must leave. This, of course, is a huge reversal for her character who, maybe 20 minutes earlier, had basically said going to Israel was not an option for her. So I wanted to hear what you all thought about that, if you thought about that.

RP: I think it makes him into this almost like Miles Davis-type character, like the mad jazz musician. There’s literally a scene where they’re doing heroin in a jazz club. I think it was part of developing the tortured artistic mystique around this particular character. And I guess the edge of being a Holocaust survivor wasn’t enough. There needed to be something else.

NK: I mean, I’ve had a couple of friends approach me saying like, “Listen man, the heroin is a corrosive force like America, et cetera.” And I buy that to a point. I will say I was just pretty unconvinced by the heroin usage as a meaningful thing, other than just to show that he was really stressed out. I didn’t really feel that it added too much to the dimension of the character. It mainly feels that the heroin is there so that we can have an overdose eventually. And the overdose is what happens in this third-to-last scene of the movie. It’s meant to provide a near-death experience to somebody, is how it felt.

MC: I will say, what I do like about the movie is, I think, just in general, about the commitment to showing the up close and personal, uncomfortable nature of trauma, and Holocaust trauma, and the pain and devastation of it, I think, is relatively interesting and certainly visceral. I guess the heroin is part of how it does that. I do think there is, perhaps, a tradition in American cinema of the Holocaust narrative as really ending with the tanks rolling in, and the camp being liberated, and that as a conclusion to a trauma. And so, I do think the fact that this movie is really committed to the details of this post-liberation trauma is somewhat interesting.

NK: No, you’re totally right. It just feels a little done before.

SM: I do agree with that. It is one of those things where I was like, “This movie does want to be announced as,” I guess, as all the reviews have included, “as a monumental statement on America, and art, and life at a very specific moment for a very specific experience.” And some of these things that felt like pulled from, quote, unquote, a lesser movie, I was like, I don’t think it was necessary. And again, yeah, the fact that it comes back—I think as you’re saying—to provide the crucial overdose moment, that changes everything. It just doesn’t feel like it’s of this movie.

RP: So after the overdose, the confrontation, we have this epilogue to the film, where we see Zsófia presenting about László at the first Architectural Biennale in Venice. What do folks think about this ending of the film?

NK: I felt like it was a bit of a dodge. It’s shot on video, and it’s meant to have a very different texture and feel and look to this movie that was just presented to you on VistaVision. You’re at the Biennale, we’re seeing a survey of works—all built in America, by the way—by László Tóth. His niece, who barely speaks before, delivers an address in his honor. The event is at the Israel Pavilion, by the way, in the script, which was pointed out to me by my editor at Screen Slate. And she gives a speech that it’s like, says something about a story that her uncle told her. But he said: The important thing is that it’s about the destination, not the journey. And then it ends. And we get a shot of Adrien Brody, dressed up as an old guy sitting in a chair, and in the act of ultimate ambiguity, perhaps—in my mind, I was thinking they should have called this section, “the ultimate ambiguity of dementia.” Because you don’t know if he’s sitting there, taking it all in and drinking in the moment with glee and excitement and appreciation, or if he’s barely there and barely conscious, that he is at the beginning of a new epoch, which is how it’s put in the script, in yet another ambiguous capstone on a movie determined not to be pinned down in what it’s saying. I did not love it. It didn’t add anything to my understanding of the movie in an especially rich way, I thought.

RP: Also, the movie is like 90% a very long journey. The destination is, I guess an ’80s retrospective of his work. That doesn’t feel very satisfying.

NK: I forgot one critical detail, which is that there’s a song. It’s non-diegetic music. So it’s music outside the scope of the story, meaning that only we, the audience, are hearing it. And it’s a pop song, and the chorus is “One for me, one for them.” Which is a Hollywood cliche for like, Barry Jenkins, right? Like so that he could make the next adaptation of a James Baldwin book or something, he had to make Lion King. One for them, he gets to make five for me, ideally. Inshallah. And so to me, that is like folded into the epilogue. It’s again, part of all these contradictions. Like, so does this mean that László caved for the rest of his fucking life, and we don’t know what happened? If they went to Israel or not? But they’re the Israel Pavilion, and then they’re saying this thing that, just as Rebecca points out, contradicts the three-hour movie that we just all sat through? There’s something going on. I will confess to not feeling like I could put my finger on it.

SM: I do think. I mean, to me, one very notable thing is Zsófia. It’s adult Zsófia, who is delivering the remarks at the commemoration for László. And for most of the movie, she’s been rendered essentially mute, totally silent, I think, as a result of just being traumatized from her experience of the Holocaust. In the flash forward, she’s an adult. She appears to be some level of thriving in her life. Her voice has been fully restored. She is dictating the events and recasting the events of László life, mythologizing them—I think, fair to say, glossing over many of the nuances and potential contradictions that shape this now old and apparently mute man sitting before her in this wheelchair. Again, the line that is, I guess, frequently being quoted is, “It was about the destination and not the journey.” And that destination, as the movie is suggesting as having been Israel in the end—I think, to me, did remind me of what we were talking about when it comes to collapsing a lot of the pain and shame and contradictions in the perhaps aborted assimilation experience that László experienced. We don’t know, after the main line events of the movie, what he ultimately decided. I think, as far as I can recall from the epilogue scene, we see a lot of instances and examples of László’s work from basically all up and down New England, I guess mostly Connecticut or something, if I’m remembering correctly. So coming back to the ambiguity questions around this movie, we ultimately don’t know what László decided. In Zsófia’s speech, she suggests that everything, from the community center that he built for Van Buren to everything else he’s made, these are all memorials to the Holocaust and to his experience, which, to my mind, honestly, I was like, “Okay, that seems believable.” But I thought much more on this almost metahistorical way of being like, “Well, this is a story that makes sense for Zsófia.” And more importantly, it’s a story that perhaps makes sense for her rendering of her own experiences. Then I took a big galaxy-brain step and thought, “Oh, maybe the final trick of the movie here is that this is ultimately a Zsófia frame story.” Not in a way that’s meant to be deceptive to the audience, to be clear, but it did force me to rethink what it was I just watched.

MC: I mean, just as Zsófia herself, in that moment there is like a physical manifestation of the triumph of Zionism, right? And that we’ve mostly seen her throughout the movie as mute, meek. She’s like the old Jewish traumatized woman. Not old in an age sense, but the old Jew as a concept. And then, eventually, we do see her later on with the new husband when she’s about to move to Israel. She’s talking but still maybe a little bit more timid. And then, she’s this really confident, beautiful, I guess, middle-aged woman giving the speech at the end, almost unrecognizable. So there is this physical idea of Zionism as transforming, somewhat, a Jewish person and imbuing them with confidence and recovering them from trauma. So I think that’s striking, but also then, indeed, what does it mean that she’s reinterpreting his works in this way, and particularly in this narrative? I mean, there’s a few things. First of all, just, thinking about it in terms of, the cycle of peoplehood quote: Where are we in the cycle of peoplehood that László had talked about when they’re being reinterpreted in this way, when they’re being used in an Israeli state platform? Is that actually part of the communal rhetoric of anger and fear that he thinks is a river of frivolities? And are we actually waiting for a moment when the buildings stand and can be recovered in a different sense? Or is this the moment of recovery when maybe there was the anger and fear after the Holocaust, and now they’ve been used differently? And there’s a real question about: What do these enduring concrete buildings mean within a cycle of peoplehood? And also, what role is a cycle of peoplehood playing? I mean, another question is: Does this man want to be a particularly specifically Jewish artist or have his works interpreted in this particularly Jewish historical way? Or does he just want to be an artist, and are they being reinterpreted by his niece because that makes sense for his story? I mean, I think we see a real affinity from him for Jewishness, Jewish identity, Jewish politics throughout the movie, so I don’t think it’s necessarily that there’s an antagonism. But I do think it leaves us real questions—what this means in terms of his vision for his art.

NK: I think one thing that draws me back to this movie being most fundamentally similar to Darren Aronofsky’s Mother—like a really painstaking exploration of an artist’s conundrum in life. And it’s dressed up in the clothes of this particular historical period, of a particular ethnonational group and religious minority, at a particular time and place. And we know those particulars and have filled in for us. And the way in which Mari has addressed this question of: We see this person who’s presented in this way, as being of this time and place in a certain way; a Holocaust victim transformed into personhood or made into a person by years of being in the land of Israel—and who, by the way, the opening frames of this movie are with Zsófia, where she’s being interrogated by a guard. Then you have her at the end again here. One of the ambiguities it’s putting to us is: What does it mean that she may be appropriating his artistic vision in this way? This person who, within the scope of this movie, is this almost sub-hero, a sub-protagonist—who’s also raped, by the way, in the movie. Off-screen, but it’s still acknowledged. I don’t know. I don’t think it’s saying anything exceptionally deliberate, but I feel like part of what Mari was getting at was these kinds of overlapping rings of readings of the movie—the artistic level as a commentary on Jews, as a commentary on immigration experience, and so on. And they don’t quite contradict one another, but they do suggest that there are, perhaps unstated, but I would suggest hierarchies of meaning in this, that yeah, it does seem like he is, in that last moment, perhaps making us wonder: Doesn’t it seem like nuts how goodness-personified—Zsófia—can do this cheesy appropriation of this beautiful artist’s work? And the people here in this podcast are sitting here questioning the premise of, “Well, is she goodness personified by the instruments that you’ve given us in this movie, which are her immigration to Israel and the purity of soul?” Like that to me is where it feels like the lattice of this movie didn’t quite work for me. It didn’t feel like the layers of meaning came through. So that, at the end, I was wowed. Yeah, it landed a little mushy there.

RP: Well, I think maybe that’s a good point to end on. Thank you all so much for all your insight. This has been a really fascinating conversation.

SM: Yeah, it was great.

NK: Yeah, I had a lot of fun.

MC: Thank you all.

RP: Thank you all so much for joining me today. Thanks to our producer, Jesse Brennaman, and our listeners. Please rate, review, and subscribe to On the Nose and subscribe to Jewish Currents. You can find us online@jewishcurrents.org, and we’ll see you next time.