For Bob Dylan and Laszlo Toth, Jewish reinvention has its limits
‘The Brutalist’ and ‘A Complete Unknown’ show men whose masterpieces can’t escape their past
Timothée Chalamet and Adrien Brody star in two stories of Jewish renewal. Photo by Canva/Lol Crawley/A24/Searchlight Pictures
By PJ Grisar January 13, 2025
For 15 minutes in Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, audiences are confronted with a still image.
Adrien Brody, as immigrant architect Laszlo Tóth, stands with his bride outside a Budapest synagogue, surrounded by family. Over the door to the building are the Hebrew words “Zeh hasha’ar ladonai” — “This is the gate to God.”
The black-and-white photograph is shown at intermission, and is a crucial piece of evidence, establishing Laszlo Tóth’s connection to his wife, Erzsébet, and niece Zsófia, who are being held in Europe in a displaced person’s camp. It’s proof of their origins, though most who encounter Tóth in America suspect his difference immediately, and he does little to hide it.
Tóth’s past is inescapable — it’s what fuels his art and a monumental pivot in his creative direction from Bauhaus and the International Style to the brutalist beast he spends most of the film building.
But in this awards season race, there are other photographs to consider.
Early on in A Complete Unknown, Bob Dylan’s aptly unknown origins are laid bare when his girlfriend’s sister finds a recently-delivered photo album with images of the young songwriter as a Boy Scout and with his childhood band in Minnesota. She then spies the shipping label: “Is that his real name? Zimmerman?”
This is an origin story that Dylan, the enigmatic troubadour, would rather you not see. As he says in a later scene, leaving a party where the guests had song requests, he resents that everyone wants him to be somebody else.
“They should just let me be,” Timothée Chalamet, as Dylan, groans. Let him be what? “Whatever it is they don’t want me to be.”
If there’s an engine that drives Dylan it is a contrary one. He bristles at boxes, and so he’s stepped out of the frame of his bar mitzvah snapshots, given himself the name of a Welsh poet and — in the climactic event of the film — shatters the customs of the Newport Folk Festival by going electric.
The Brutalist and A Complete Unknown share an artistic heresy fired by two diverging Jewish identities, each of which could only be partially obscured.
Tóth speaks of making buildings that will survive political upheaval, and “endure such erosion of the Danube’s shoreline.” Dylan is never so lofty, defining himself in opposition to any club that would have him for a member.
Dylan won’t be a folk musician for long. He’ll shed his Jewish name (and in a potential sequel, even his Jewishness during that evangelical era), his tried-on politics and all else that stands in the way of his self-invention.
The paradox is, that though he would seem to be abandoning his folk roots, he is in fact returning to the rock ethos that was so formative for him. Even as he strikes out to be a sui generis figure, he betrays his influences. Those include his Hebrew school credentials; the title track on his post-electric album, Highway 61 Revisited, begins “God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son’/Abe says, ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on.'” (Abram, Bob Dylan might not have wanted you to know, was the name of Robert Zimmerman’s father.)
For Tóth, hiding his background was never an option, not in America, and certainly not in Europe during the war.
“I thought my reputation might help to protect us,” he says at one point. “It was the opposite. There was no way to remain anonymous.”
Arriving in the United States, Tóth can’t conceal his accent. When he’s awarded his first major commission — a community center and chapel in Doylestown, Pennsylvania — he must respond diplomatically to anonymous questions “probing my personal background, heritage and ideological persuasion.”
He answers by offering commonalities — their town is a lot like his, their church not so different from his boyhood temple. Dylan, when pressed about his past, fabricates stories of working at a carnival with fire eaters and a burn victim who resembles a “grown-up, wrinkly baby.”
Though their tactics differ, their vision ultimately goes beyond what their patrons are comfortable with.
Dylan impresses mainstays of the folk movement with his protest songs and Tóth gets the community center job after designing a minimalist library with movable slats covering the shelves. But these were never the totality of their work.
Feeling trapped in the Gaslight Cafe or the pretty lyricism of Joan Baez, Dylan jams out with session musicians his own age to create the iconic organ riff in “Like A Rolling Stone,” perhaps recreating the bonhomie he had back in Minnesota with his high school bandmates who played Little Richard and memorized his b-sides.
Tóth, meanwhile, becomes increasingly insistent on his design while his backer becomes evermore frustrated by its ambition. Tóth can’t compromise because the community center is an exorcism, reimagining Buchenwald, where he survived, and linking it to a space standing in for Dachau, where his wife was imprisoned.
Taken together, the films wonder at the actual promise of America for people seeking a fresh start. That promise is what drew Tóth across an ocean and a bum-gloved Dylan to the Village, but for a certain kind of person that renewal isn’t possible even in the land of opportunity.
Even in the depths of self-mythology, neither man can move beyond his personal history. When they stop pretending, they produce masterpieces.
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