Master builder

Famous architects aren’t known for their small-scale vision. The nature of their work is to think big and build big — especially when the architect is as visionary as Frank Gehry. And so there are certain things you don’t expect to hear world-renowned master builders like Gehry vocalize. Things like insecurity. Self-doubt. Hesitancy.

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This is, after all, the same man whose sensuous, undulating forms and maverick use of unconventional materials have imprinted such famous buildings as Spain’s Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Vitra Furniture Museum in Germany, and the forthcoming Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem. Early on in Sydney Pollack’s (Tootsie) first documentary, Sketches of Frank Gehry, Gehry admits that at the beginning of a project, “I’m always scared that I’m not going to know what to do.”

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Moments such as this result in an enthralling portrait of its subject, illuminating the creative drive and artistic process that have made Gehry probably the biggest name in the current ranks of starchitecture.

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Pollack, who is also Gehry’s friend and appears frequently in the film, manages to both enhance Gehry’s legend (and by association, his own) while still offering enough humble moments to humanize the super-size legend. Sketches touches on some of the personal struggles that define Gehry, which include anti-Semitism and economic insecurity. Though Gehry’s difficulties have become less grave, Pollack’s film shows a man still dealing with the inward turmoil of any artist: issues of creative blocks, mortality and self-doubt that persist despite enormous success.

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Part of the film’s appeal is, as much as Crumb made by R. Crumb’s friend Terry Zwigoff, the common vision and friendship shared by subject and filmmaker. As the film progresses, it becomes clear there is no philosophical dimension to the large-scale creativity Gehry has pondered that Pollack also hasn’t considered. Both men work with big budgets and enormous casts of people, and have creative lives driven by an internal vision dictated by high-powered and demanding clients. Sketches of Frank Gehry’s pleasure and peril is in its vision of two wealthy buddies — clearly accustomed to the introspection that expensive analysis brings — as if sitting back after a couple of glasses of wine to appraise what they’ve done and why they’ve done it.

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“It feels almost fragile the way people discover things that are meaningful for their whole lives,” Pollack says when questioning why Gehry came to be an architect above all the other choices available to him. Gehry can only nod in affirmation at the serendipity of how people find their calling. The film shows how people’s lives are very much like the buildings Gehry is shown coaxing from endless sketches and models that are cut and pasted and reassembled and shaped until one form results. Like a building, we have the possibility of assuming many forms, but we eventually become one fixed and singular thing.

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In Pollack’s film, Gehry sees himself not just as an architect, but as an artist. The way Gehry works, and the buildings that Pollack assembles into seductive montages, often suggest nothing so much as large, inhabitable sculptures.

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An alpha group of big-name, creative tough guys is interviewed to attest to their friend Gehry’s artistry: artist Ed Ruscha, actor Dennis Hopper and corporate moguls such as Barry Diller, Michael Eisner and Michael Ovitz. By suggesting that Gehry is the architect of choice for attention-commanding, cerebral he-men, his clients unconsciously bolster his critics’ claims that Gehry’s buildings are flashy showboats more about ego and money than anything.

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Pollack stocking his film with this Masters of the Universe fraternity is nearly laughable. Does a man as esteemed as Gehry really need the advocacy of the increasingly self-parodying ’80s art star Julian Schnabel? Shown first in his Hugh Hefner-esque bathrobe, by the end of the film Schnabel is seated in the robe and sunglasses in a baronial chair sipping brandy and defending the good name of Gehry. At one point, Schnabel opines that the architect’s critics “are like flies flying around on the neck of a lion.”

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The flies are embodied by the squeaky-wheel “dissenting” voice of critic Hal Foster, whose discussion of Gehry as a “brand” and his buildings as “spectacles” certainly is worth considering. Foster is, of course, not Gehry’s only critic; Gehry long has been a controversial and divisive figure within architectural circles. But the way Pollack stacks his deck with all of those power brokers coming to the defense of one of their own — “When I see a building like the one Frank made, I want to stick my stuff in there,” Schnabel gushes in homoerotic rapture — is coarse and bullying. It’s as if the subtext suggests that big money trumps effeminate Princeton theoreticians any day.

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Sketches of Frank Gehry is an endeavor worth pursuing, but Pollack’s obvious discomfort with allowing much doubt beyond Gehry’s own small-scale insecurities says more than he may have intended about how great men operate.

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Any limitations in Pollack’s film are thus probably more attributable to his allegiance to principles of Hollywood film and a failure to embrace the documentary’s central tenet of going deep into the material. Pollack is a Hollywood director used to stoking our allegiance to his characters without ever casting too much doubt on their motives or undercutting their integrity. Despite venturing into the new form of documentary, Pollack is still enthralled by the kind of heroic ideals that conventional films revere. So, in a sense, having Gehry’s own therapist, Milton Wexler, on screen to discuss his patient’s inner life only intensifies the egocentric drive of the film, propping up the singular, marvelous, scrutiny-worthy complexity of this man.

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Much as Pollack surely does, we end up liking Gehry all the more for his frailties. But without a balanced inquiry into the full complexity of his controversial architecture, the man ends up privileged at the expense of a better understanding of the art.