Architect’s profile has little foundation

Rarely has a film been so aptly titled as "Sketches of Frank Gehry." A reference to the raw drawings that the world-famous architect roughs out as his first step toward a new building, it precisely describes the documentary's superficiality.

The film offers confirmation, through brief illustration of Gehry's working methods and a travelogue of his major buildings, that the man who designed the remarkable Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao has an extraordinarily free imagination and a brilliant visual sense.

But if you're curious about what made Gehry turn out so different from everyone else in his field, or the role of architecture in the modern urban world, you won't glean much insight here. "Sketches of Frank Gehry" is little more than a congratulatory, non-probing portrait of the genius as an ordinary guy.

"Sketches of Frank Gehry" opens Friday, May 26 around the Bay Area. It is scheduled to air in September as part of PBS' "American Masters" series.

The L.A.-based architect has been friends for some years with another Jewish power player, Hollywood producer, director and actor Sydney Pollack. Approached by several filmmakers about being the subject of a documentary, Gehry turned them down and convinced Pollack to shoot it.

Unfortunately, that's not only the raison d'être of the film but its structure, for "Sketches of Frank Gehry" is largely propelled by snippets of their conversations and interviews. They discuss their shared creative concerns — fear of the blank canvas, pleasing the client (or audience) without overly compromising and balancing art and commerce — but there's something ridiculous about a middling Hollywood director putting himself on the same plane as an architectural giant.

Indeed, an air of smugness cloaks the film that cannot be attributed to Gehry. Blame it instead on the abundance of narcissistic shots of Pollack filming his friend with a small digital camera.

The bigger problem is that the documentary is shapeless and devoid of drama. This isn't a rags-to-riches story, nor is it enlivened by a midlife crisis, outsized failure or late-career comeback. We are left yearning for a far more insightful and useful film that, say, would follow Gehry from start to finish of a single commission.

He was born Frank Goldberg in Toronto, and he confides that he changed his name at the insistence of his first wife. He offers no further elaboration on his relationship to his Jewish identity. Gehry was commissioned to design the Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem, but the film also breezes over that little detail.

The parade of Jews — Michael Ovitz, Michael Eisner, Barry Diller and Julian Schnabel (in his trademark bathrobe) — that Pollack calls on to join him in harmonizing about the architect's talent suggests that Gehry may feel more kinship with Jews than with Judaism.

His therapist for 35 years, Milton Wexler, comments blandly on a range of topics — so much for patient-client privacy — but says little about Gehry's roots. The shrink, however, does help us see how ambitious and competitive Gehry is under his deceptive veneer of easygoing rumpledness.

For all his charm and talent, Gehry comes off as a far less compelling and complex figure than Louis Kahn, the late Jewish architect profiled a couple of years ago in his son's provocative documentary, "My Architect." That film is superior to "Sketches of Frank Gehry" on every count, even if its subject never became a pop culture icon.




"Sketches of Frank Gehry" opens Friday, May 26 at the Embarcadero Center Cinema and Empire 3 in San Francisco, Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, Albany Twin in Albany, Century 5 in Pleasant Hill, CineArts in Palo Alto and Santana Row in San Jose.