Sketch of a Starchitect

Sketches of Frank Gehry

Directed by Sydney Pollack

In Sydney Pollack's best recent film, Random Hearts (2001), Harrison Ford and Kristin Scott-Thomas' wardrobe vied with the emotive moment when the camera searched a vacant, lonesome house while a telephone rang unanswered. The ineffable stood equal with haute couture. You know a filmmaker has become a Hollywood fat cat when he gives materialism the same importance as fate. This problem recurs in Sketches of Frank Gehry, the first documentary Pollack has made, which is a paean to the the world's currently most venerated celebrity architect. Throughout Sketches, Irony stands as high as the world's tallest building in Shanghai, because this film about architecture has been made by a director with one of the least distinguished pair of eyes in Hollywood. And be assured, Pollack is certainly "Hollywood," a fact you can ascertain by the decision to focus on designer du jour Gehry. (Is there soon to be an oblong swimming pool and wobbly cabana house on Pollack's estate?)

Pollack's narrative is modest: Interviews with Gehry are intercut with opinions on his buildings by critics, artists and assorted admirers. But the buildings themselves-especially the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain-are never shown in a way that displays their grandeur. Pollack tells us to admire Gehry's originality and craft but the structures, as presented, are emphatically not moving. It's worse than the moment in Truth or Dare when live concert footage exposes the fact that Madonna cannot sing.

Sketches disappoints because Pollack doesn't know how to make images sing. Although he has artist Ed Ruscha (part of the Los Angeles art clique) testify that Gehry "mixes the freewheeling of art with the unforgiving laws of physics," and Julian Schnabel preens in his white bathroom, holding a snifter of cognac while comparing Gehry's audacity to that of Apocalypse Now, the film is full of static, poorly cropped images of Gehry's buildings. Not cinematically impressive.

Lacking scale and depth and wonder, none of these images match the faux-architecture of Fritz Lang's Metropolis or that mix of awe and regret that Nathaniel Kahn (son of architect Lewis Kahn) conveyed when expressing an abandoned child's discovery of his father's artistry in My Architect: A Son's Journey (2004).

At times, it seems that Pollack means for us to be excited by the fact of Gehry's celebrity itself, as if the film was one of those "in-depth" suck-up articles in Vanity Fair or Rolling Stone. What's up with the strange emphasis on psychologist Milton Wexler, except to show Pollack's curious acceptance of Gehry's participation in those Hollywood phenomena: therapy and divorce?

Irony is particularly vivid when Pollack relates to Gehry on artistic terms. On reviews: "I want to hide under the covers," Gehry says. "I know the feeling very well," Pollack avers. "I know you do," brother Frank reassures.

It gets worse when whory Pollack confesses that he has "made peace with the commercial world by finding a small space where he could make a difference." Except for They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969), it's hard to think of a Pollack movie that makes a difference or that could not have been made by just anybody. Horses has a disillusioned '60s signature and stylistic yearning as distinct as Gehry's. Its singular accomplishment is what patron Michael Eisner meant when claiming, "You give Frank the functionality, and he delivers the picture."

Sketches disappoints because Pollack does not deliver the picture of what makes Gehry's architecture notable. When disapproving art critic Hal Foster rejects the hype and says Gehry's buildings "function as spectacle" rather than durable edifices, that shrewd critical perception gets lost because Pollack has failed to make Gehry's structures work as cinematic spectacle.

Sad fact is, despite Pollack's expensive taste in clothes and buildings, he's all wrong for a movie about architecture. Gehry needed a genuine cinema artist like Antonioni or John Boorman, directors who know how to make imposing buildings seem to dance. Or even the music video director Hype Williams who shot Mariah Carey's "Sweetheart" video among the flying wings and metallic curvature of the Bilbao museum and achieved a sense of wonder. For Pollack to pretend that he understands art or the artistic temperament turns the daydreamed drawing-board squiggles revealed in Sketches into nonsense.