One Stone at a Time

On building Jewish homes in "The Brutalist" and "A Real Pain."

The Brutalist is so old-school a movie that it has a 15-minute intermission between the first and second halves. As an onscreen clock ticks down, alerting you to how much time remains for you to drain your bladder or refill your popcorn, a still image appears on the screen. It is of a man and woman on their wedding day, posed in front of a synagogue, a young girl standing alongside the happy couple. The photograph, we have already learned, was taken in Budapest, a relic of a lost life for refugee architect Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody), and of a world now consumed by ashes. It is the only glimpse we get in a three-and-half-hour film (other than some photos of his European buildings) of Laszlo’s former life. Over the entrance arch of the synagogue, there is a Hebrew inscription that reads ze hasha’ar l’adonai: “This is the gateway to the Lord.”

The inscription is a standard one for synagogues the world over, but director Brady Corbet is featuring it here for a particular reason. For Laszlo is an architect, and while we do occasionally see him praying in The Brutalist, his truest form of prayer is in the crafting of spaces. For 15 minutes, we are asked to do nothing other than ponder this single heartbreaking image of a lost universe.

Architecture is Laszlo’s gateway to God, and Best Picture nominee The Brutalist is one of two current Oscar contenders that raises the question of what it might mean to make a Jewish space, and how those spaces are at the mercy of larger, more mercurial forces.

In Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin play cousins on a Jewish-heritage tour of Poland. Their grandmother had set aside money in her will for them to visit the place of her birth, and they travel together on a guided tour of locations haunted by the ghostly remnants of what had once been a flourishing Jewish life in Poland. David (Eisenberg) is white-collar, upwardly mobile, neurotic; Benji (Culkin) is underemployed, oscillating between caustic barbs flung at others and surprising flashes of insight. Benji and David love each other, misunderstand each other, struggle with the question of whether they know each other anymore.

The film is about characters on a historical tour of Poland that is itself a pocket history of Jewish Poland. We visit Warsaw and Lublin alongside the characters, listening to the tour guide as he summarizes one thousand years of Jewish history, culminating in the Holocaust and the murder of two million Polish Jews. All of Poland is a lost Jewish home, a place that had once made room for David and Benji’s grandmother, and so many others, and then, abruptly, stopped.

Benji and David are taken to visit the oldest Jewish gravestone in all of Poland, and the tour guide (himself not Jewish) suggests they each leave a stone behind atop the headstone. Leaving a stone, he explains, is Jewish tradition, an act of memory that serves as a reminder that even the dead are not forgotten.

Near the end of the film, Benji and David leave the tour in order to go in search of their grandmother’s home. Inspired by their cemetery visit, they locate a single stone and plan to leave it behind on the doorstep, a memento of their visit and a marker of their remembrance.

Some of the places that sustained Jewish life in Europe still exist. Some of the homes, synagogues, and streets still exist. But the link that unites past and present has been forever severed. All Benji and David can do is stand in the place that once was a family home, and leave behind a symbol of their yearning. There are no graves for the Holocaust dead, no peaceful places to mourn what has been lost. These American Jews are of European descent but with no meaningful connection to Europe. They are here to remember what cannot be remembered.

But of course, A Real Pain does not leave us there. As Benji and David place their stone, a man on a nearby balcony begins shouting at them in Polish, accompanied by a younger, English-speaking translator. He is asking Benji and David why they are leaving a stone on the doorstep, and when they explain, he balks. They must remove the stone.

Benji and David are being told that their memorial cannot stay, that their history has no place here. This home does not belong to them, even in memory. (How did the current owners of their grandmother’s house take possession of it, anyway?)

A Real Pain ends with Benji and David returning to New York. The camera lingers outside David’s apartment door, where he has placed the stone he was forbidden from leaving behind in Lublin. David is reminding himself that he must remember here, too, in his ordinary life, that he must carry his grandmother’s story with him every time he steps out the door, and every time he returns home. The stone is also a reminder that there is no family home in Poland, no place to remember there. Jewish homes must carry within them the memory of the homes that exist nowhere else but in memory.

In The Brutalist, Laszlo is defined, first and foremost, by having no home of his own. When we first see him, he is arriving in New York Harbor, where the Statue of Liberty first appears upside down in his line of sight. This is America, but not as we have been accustomed to see it; and this is an immigrant story without the requisite American Dream to go with it.

Laszlo has been given temporary shelter by his Americanized cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) in a back room of his Philadelphia furniture showroom. Corbet mostly keeps us out of Laszlo’s room, preferring to pen us in the spaces in which Laszlo is only a guest at best: the showroom, or his cousin’s apartment upstairs. All Laszlo has to himself is a dank room with a single bed, and Attila’s Gentile wife soon makes clear that he is unwelcome there too, eventually falsely accusing him of assaulting her and kicking him out.

Attila has changed his name and converted to Christianity, and while he does not say so explicitly, The Brutalist makes clear just why Attila has sought to cleave himself of all recognizable Jewish identity a bit later in the film. Laszlo and Attila are hired to help design a library by the son of a wealthy industrialist portentously named Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce). (It is worth observing that the name of Laszlo’s Protestant savior and foil contains within it the name of three different presidents and one military commander, stalwarts of America’s political and military legacy from which Laszlo is excluded.)

Van Buren lashes out furiously when he discovers the surprise renovation project, but eventually tracks Laszlo down and hires him to design a vast community center in his mother’s memory in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. It is telling that Laszlo, separated from his own family, is being asked to build something in honor of someone else’s family. Laszlo has spent the years since the end of the war bouncing from one dead-end job to another, anxiously awaiting the arrival of his wife and niece from a European displaced-persons camp. Laszlo moves onto the Van Buren estate to design the community center, eschewing a home of his own once again in the name of architecture.

Doylestown is a silently seething hotbed of antisemitic animus roiled by the presence of Laszlo. Its residents loathe the concept of a Jew designing their community center. The planned nondenominational chapel is transformed into a church. And when the project inevitably breaks down, Van Buren’s son Harry (Joe Alwyn) makes their feelings toward Laszlo abundantly clear. “We tolerate you,” he tells Laszlo, spitting each word with unbridled fury. Laszlo builds spaces in which he is tolerated—at best. Laszlo is a refugee and a survivor (although we do not yet, at this point in the film, know all the details of his wartime experience), and everything he has seen and heard in the United States makes it clear that, for him, there is no home to be had here, either.

The Van Burens commingle lavish praise with brutality, and the foremost mystery of The Brutalist is why Laszlo keeps returning to them. One part is easy to understand: Laszlo has been scrabbling by as a day laborer, and the Van Burens’ attention restores him to his prewar status as an architect. But then we observe more closely when Laszlo’s wife Erszebet (Felicity Jones) and his niece Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy) finally arrive in the United States in part 2, and realize that all his life is devoted to the same task of rebuilding the destroyed Jewish home.

Erszebet, he learns, is unable to walk, wracked with pain from unspecified wartime suffering, and Zsofia is her caretaker. They have been reunited, but have no space to call their own, and struggle to rediscover the familial harmony blown apart by the Holocaust. Laszlo has reached his happy ending, his reunited family, and it still feels misaligned, like a building whose walls don’t sit flush with its floors.

But Laszlo is still intent on building the Van Burens’ dream palace, no matter how many times they humiliate or hurt him, no matter how clearly they inform him that he will never be truly American. Laszlo is at his most alive as he walks through the spaces of his community center. He wins over the recalcitrant Doylestowners by demonstrating how the light spilling into the chapel will form a cross of sunshine on the ground, a Christian sheath in which to contain his Jewish ideas.

It is not until the film’s epilogue, set in Venice in the 1980s, that we fully understand Laszlo’s motivations. Laszlo, now elderly, is no longer able to communicate, and Zsofia is sent in his stead to speak at a tribute to her uncle’s architectural work.

Zsofia shows the audience slides of the Doylestown community center and explains its hidden motivation. Laszlo drew on the architectural plans for the concentration camps in which he and Erszebet had been confined and brought them together in this unexpected American space. Laszlo had been building an American dream house that would contain both his and Erszebet’s pain and suffering, and unify them under a single roof, welded together by the force of his yearning for his lost family.

The residents of Doylestown are deeply concerned at the thought of a “foreigner”—read “Jew”—designing their community center, and asked Van Buren to select a Protestant architect in his stead. But little can they imagine that their church and community space is itself a hooded reflection of the Jewish trauma of Europe, and of one indefatigable artist’s desire for the simplicity and comfort of a home which can no longer be. But what does it say of Laszlo’s psyche that the way in which he chooses to do that is by bringing their separate death camps together under one roof, rather than, say, building an actual, brick-and-mortar home for himself and his family?

Laszlo builds a Jewish home for himself and Erszebet, but it must be smuggled into existence, veiled under cover of the oppressive Christianity of Doylestown and the imprimatur of the Van Burens. Laszlo is insistent that his story be folded into the fabric of Doylestown—of America. But it is too delicate to be exposed to the public eye, and must be hidden from sight, posing as something more gentile, more genteel. It is a gateway to the Lord that is bricked up, covered with ivy, kept from sight.

Jewish homes are not to be spoken of, not to be consciously built. They are empires of the mind, carried with Jewish people to all the places they go, welcomed or otherwise. Whether built out of a single stone or a massive slab of concrete, they are impossibly fragile, and impossibly precious.

---

The Ministry Recommends…

Jennifer: Is your brain, like mine, constantly toggling back and forth between snippets of Kendrick Lamar’s inescapable “Not Like Us” and news-induced existential terror? I have the perfect solution for you! Download the EDM Remix of “Hostile Government Takeover” by AGiftFromTodd and Vinny Marchi. AGiftFromTodd’s catchy lament (“And if you’re sayin’ wait a minute, who we got to stop this? We had one but you didn’t want that lady in office”) went viral a few weeks ago, with many social media users remixing and duetting with it, but Marchi’s mix was a cut above. The two have released it on the major streaming platforms, where it has been climbing the charts. This won’t solve all of our problems, but at least we can dance it out—and maybe, just maybe, wake up one morning without “Not Like Us” in our heads.

Saul: If you don’t know the name Wright Thompson, you should. Thompson is the author of what may be the single best piece of writing about baseball in the 21st century. His new book The Barn is a reckoning with his Mississippi childhood, and with the story of Emmett Till, omnipresent and also unmentionable. You may think you know the story of Till’s murder, but you don’t. Thompson has the receipts, and the exceptional writing chops to offer us America’s story in compressed form. We need this book right now.

Kirthana recommends: If you're a fan of Severance and want another TV show with a twisty, compelling premise and excellent cast, check out Hulu's Paradise. Sterling K. Brown is a Secret Service agent assigned to protect the President of the United States (James Marsden) ... only for POTUS to die on his watch. That is in no way a spoiler, because there is so much more going on beneath the surface (pun intended). Since the show was created by This Is Us' Dan Fogelman, you can expect multiple timelines, flashbacks and plot twists. And since the drama was just renewed for a second season, you don't have to worry about getting invested in a series only for it to end abruptly.