What type of film does Harrison Lee Van Buren think he’s in? Is it one with the same type of stateliness as The Brutalist, but without the contemporary flair heard in Daniel Blumberg’s score, or felt in cinematographer Lol Crawley’s subjective camera choices? Is it lit with more golden hues, more closely tied to a 1950s VistaVision melodrama rather than director Brady Corbet’s drabber, patient European arthouse style? Is it less morally complicated, and does the conflict ultimately reflect well on Van Buren’s intelligence and ability?
This would all be in step with how Van Buren mythologizes himself, but he’s just a supporting character in the saga of László Tóth (Adrien Brody). Because he is not the film’s subject, the audience is offered a critical distance from which to view him, observing him through the protagonists, a fractured family of Hungarian Holocaust survivors. Van Buren needs eyes on him, but because the film only sees him through the awestruck or critical points of view of the main characters, those in the audience clearly see how he’s trying to win favor. Oscar nominee Guy Pearce doesn’t just give the best supporting performance of the year as Harrison Lee Van Buren, but he does so playing the best supporting character of the year.
During the few hours the film spends in his company, Van Buren is driven by the fear that his hollowness will be uncovered. He’s overbearing but aloof, unmissable but deliberately distant. The wealthy Doylestown, Pennsylvania industrialist employs László Tóth (Adrien Brody), an accomplished Jewish architect who emigrates to America after being liberated from Buchenwald, for a grand, showy construction project sat atop a hill overlooking the town below. Van Buren knows László is the story, the talent, the star—so naturally, he wants to own him.
The building—which intends to combine a library, gymnasium, theater, chapel, and swimming pool under one brutalist roof—fulfills the contradictory ambitions of both architect and patron. Tóth sees it as a synthesis of his art and load-bearing place in history; Van Buren sees it as a testament to his prestige for decades, if not centuries, to come.
Van Buren admits he has little taste for modern art, but he perks up when a magazine spread praises the reading room he scorned Tóth for building without his supervision. Photographs of a smarmy Van Buren posed beside the avant-garde work are matched with the heading “Forward-Thinker,” and their potency goes straight to his image-obsessed head. Even if their differences in integrity and power drive Van Buren and Tóth toward irreparable estrangement (not to mention a dehumanizing act of sexual violence), the men both chase a new postwar reputation and are united by the same urge: They want to look at the “Margaret Lee Van Buren Center for Activity and Creation” and say, “I made that.”
As the WASPy tycoon bankrolling the project, Van Buren can easily crush the claims of those around him, even if it’s difficult to work out whether he’s scheming or stupid. Pearce plays Van Buren’s idiocy and canniness as so closely interlinked that, at many points in The Brutalist, he is a true galaxy-brained moron. His love for superficiality is clear on every performative smile and entitled frown that dances across Pearce’s tanned face, amplified by the tiny creases in his thin, styled moustache and eyebrows. One sees the gearboxes turning in his head whenever he has to deliberate between hot-tempered builders or play the genial host to Tóth and his osteoporosis-stricken wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones). He’s so chuffed with how he charms and schemes, but without realizing that his audience (less so László) can see right through him. Every emotion and desire lies on the surface, because there is nothing beneath—if one performed an autopsy on him, they’d find the aggressive tenets of American aristocracy intact and unquestioned, embedded in his muscles and nervous system, his heart beating out rhythmic reminders that being self-obsessed and territorial is justified, even patriotic.
Take the scene where, during a celebration at Van Buren’s home, he performs his origin story to an impressionable audience of one: László. Pearce luxuriates over the details, driving towards the reveal that Van Buren financially humiliated his impoverished maternal grandparents when they pleaded for cash after learning of his initial success. Being able to coax László into the internal logic of his personal system of values is so important that when a well-read party guest stops by to compare Tóth’s reading room to a Borges short story, he can’t hide his disinterest and frustration. Van Buren explains with venomous conviction that his relatives’ poverty was so mortifying that he couldn’t bring himself to be charitable, barely disguising the fact that his mind was made up to punish them for disowning his mother.
Van Buren is so affected by László’s complexity, artistry, and poverty (Pearce’s best acting comes when Van Buren is being overtly, cringingly friendly with the architect) that he wants to explain how he was driven by emotion to make a symbolic point, perhaps to prove to László that he too can be imaginative and even “artistic” if need be. But it’s a story about someone who thinks that an ability to amass wealth also blesses you with a sense of justice. Despite the comfortable, conversational tone of the scene, it’s the ugliest that Pearce gets in The Brutalist’s first half, more so than his surprised outburst when he discovers his renovated reading room. Despite the monologue toeing the line between unfiltered and rehearsed (a symptom of Van Buren rigorously but myopically constructing his life’s narrative), there’s a nakedness to it—no matter how small and lowly a person is, Van Buren is comfortable disproportionately punishing them if he feels personally slighted. Ego is a fickle, vengeful impulse.
In that fickleness, Pearce is given a role colored by contrasting moods and motives in every scene. Van Buren changes tack between scene transitions, being warm and confessive to László one night before turning curt and demanding the next morning. He’s deeply self-conscious, afraid that people with much more humanity and intelligence, like Erzsébet, will undermine his facile dedication to self-curation; the film’s second half is filled with Van Buren demeaning László, tearing apart the trust and loyalty built in the first half. Van Buren reminds the émigrés of the hierarchy that defines society, and in his aptly narcissistic way, he wants his dependents to think him as jovial, thoughtful, and benevolent for helping them in the first place. The more trivial instances of this, like when he compares László to a shoeshiner or tests Erzsébet’s cultural knowledge (when she’s isolated from her husband in Van Buren’s car), are played for comedy; the graver ones are played for horror. Pearce assuredly brings out his character’s survival instincts but never considers introspection—Van Buren isn’t worried nobody likes him, he’s bothered by those who undermine him, especially by those outside the boundaries of his race and class.
The Brutalist’s faithfulness to László’s perspective means that we mostly see Van Buren when he wants to see László—as if the industrialist is self-selecting his screentime to make himself desired and depended upon by the protagonist. In fact, the film is in Van Buren’s company without László only a few times: once as an aside to the Doylestown mayor behind László’s back, once with Erzsébet and their niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) on a drive, and once when Erzsébet confronts him, during a dinner, for raping her husband.
When Van Buren speaks candidly with the mayor, he’s doing damage control after László threw a tantrum at local architect Jim Simpson (Michael Epp) for compromising his vision. This is in direct contradiction to what László believes is going to happen, but Van Buren says Simpson will stay because “it’s better for morale”—as in, it will comfort the white and wealthy who are unsure about the authority of the ethnic outsider. This lone instance of breaking from László, Erzsébet, or Zsófia’s POV is a reminder that elites like Van Buren are the only real self-determining force in America. Van Buren admitting his manipulation to the mayor isn’t just its text (Van Buren betraying László), but its metatext (a betrayal of our dramatic loyalty to László’s story). We are now complicit in the schemes of the oppressor.
This brings back up those opening questions. It’s not that Van Buren thinks he’s the main character in The Brutalist’s story. He can tell László is a marvel, not just intellectually stimulating, but immensely valuable—an extractable resource, an appreciating currency, a ticket to social capital. Van Buren relishes being the most attractive, sincere, and significant person in the architect’s life, another reason why Erzsébet’s arrival threatens his equilibrium, but he has fetishized the very idea of “supporting,” of being the man behind the exotic artistic genius. But it is only the image of this that matters. Underneath his open charm, Pearce’s performance is driven by swollen, sensitive ego.
When this ego and image burst, so too does Van Buren. In front of his business associates, Erzsébet screams that Van Buren raped her husband in Italy, and the dinner party collapses into chaos. Looking around the dining room, Van Buren’s son Harry (Joe Alwyn) notices that his father has disappeared—prompting a search and rescue mission around the unfinished hilltop building, which Corbet maps out with cuts between disconnected chambers and corridors.
Van Buren was swallowed by László’s building, implying that although he never appreciated the artistry of postwar architecture, on some level he recognized that László had constructed something more complex and domineering than him. The power of his estate means nothing if its reputation has been tainted, and he means nothing if his wealth and power have been undermined. What makes Pearce’s performance so inspired is the relentlessness of Van Buren’s expressions of confidence. He never shows clear signs that he isn’t sure of himself, but the ways he cuts across people after fawning over them—the ways he explains himself too much without risking any vulnerability—point to a man severely involved in his own project, supervising the construction of a “Harrison Lee Van Buren” identity. If the funding falls through, he’s willing to pull the plug. He has given everything to his own image; if it’s damaged, he will simply vanish.
We are drawn to and repulsed by Van Buren. Drawn in because Pearce is enthralling, in command of his character and craft, and because of Van Buren’s luxurious tenor, and his extravagance and zeal that’s both amusing and seductive. But we are repulsed because we know exactly who he is and what he represents, even if this clarity doesn’t change anything. In The Brutalist’s background (and foreground, if it suits him) is a man trying to bend the protagonist’s arc around his own. Van Buren is a man who sees himself as a meaningful figure in American history—exceptional, powerful, epoch-shaping, a lead character—but can’t understand that he is simply one of its many identical financiers who wants to buy people wholesale.
