By David Elliott
MOVIE CRITIC

May 25, 2006

Frank Gehry's buildings provoke love or hate (ambivalence is squishy). “Sketches of Frank Gehry” is a love croon.

It was made by his Los Angeles pal Sydney Pollack, the famed film director. The man whose scoopingly folded, sail-and-prow buildings have curveballed the architectural vocabulary may shape our century. On film, he is a cherubic, dumpy guy who welcomes Pollack with more charm than depth.

Gehry's massive Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, humped and glowing in the sun like a bronzed whale, is memorably visited. The newer Disney Concert Hall in L.A., hugely expensive and defiantly Disney in spirit, is seen on opening night, with Gehry taking an awkward bow.

The video-equipped Pollack gently probes into Gehry's method, which a bit alarmingly seems at times nearly unrelated to function (Gehry indicates his wastebasket as a source of formal ideas). There are glitches. Just as Frank Lloyd Wright designed leaking roofs, Gehry's metal-skinned Disney has caused problems with light-and-heat bounce.

“That makes you perfect,” said Frank, after Sydney explained that he'd never made a documentary and knew nothing of architecture. Not perfect, almost shapeless, the movie often seems like notes posted on Pollack's refrigerator.

MOVIE REVIEW “Sketches of Frank Gehry” Unrated; Opens tomorrow ½

Knowing no architecture is a handicap. Philip Johnson appears, shortly before his death, simply to acclaim Gehry's greatness. Gehry offers a nod of tribute to Finland's Alvar Aalto. A more knowing director might have provided some larger context, about other trends in building and about Gehry's likely debt to such brave experimenters as Gaudi, Wright, Goff, Utzon, Lautner and Eero Saarinen.

Instead, Pollack used his entree to such showbiz pillars as Mike Ovitz, Michael Eisner and Barry Diller, and Gehry pals Dennis Hopper and Julian Schnabel. Some skepticism is heard, a whiff from purring savant Charles Jencks, more from critic Hal Foster, who speaks as if walking among land mines.

We learn that a rabbi told Gehry, as a young Jewish Canadian lad, that he had “golden hands,” but then changed his name from Goldberg. He came to art fairly late, did conventionally handsome work, then shucked it for a leap into stagey stylings, starting with his improvised home in Santa Monica.

His buildings can be exciting, but living in a brave new world of them could be like Kafka Vegas. Of course, many people feel that way about the glass box, perfected long ago by Mies. Gehry smashed the box.

This charming movie lacks the surprising, intimate depth of Nathaniel Kahn's film on his father, Louis, “My Architect.” Perhaps less a form-giver than a brash structural animator, Gehry has made edifices both exquisite and exhibitionistic. In the best bit, Gehry regrets not having created “painterly surfaces” – and then Pollack shows us that he has.

  

 A Sony Pictures Classics release. Director: Sydney Pollack. Cast: Frank Gehry, Sydney Pollack, Julian Schnabel, Philip Johnson, Dennis Hopper, Charles Jencks, Michael Friedman, Barry Diller, Craig Webb. Running time: 1 hr., 40 min.

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