Full houses, and the people who build them.
The simultaneous releases of two feature films about architects shouldn't surprise anyone. The profession of architecture has always been a favorite choice for movie characters, perhaps because directors identify so strongly with the job. Except for military general, no profession is so frequently invoked by filmmakers as a means of explaining what they do and how they do it; architecture might be a better analogy because, under ideal circumstances, the filmmaking process is more about creation than destruction.
This week brings the arrival of My Architect: A Son's Journey, a documentary about Louis Kahn by his illegitimate son, Nathaniel, opening Nov. 12 at Film Forum; and A House on a Hill, a drama about an architect that marks the fiction-filmmaking debut of editor and documentarian Chuck Workman. My Architect is about the filmmaker's struggle to understand his father, a gifted but inscrutable genius who juggled an international career and three families?one with his wife and two more with long-term girlfriends. A House on a Hill is a melancholy fable about an aging architect (the predictably superb Philip Baker Hall) who receives a second chance to complete a dream project that was begun long ago in the Hollywood Hills and then aborted.
The films have much in common beyond their interest in architects and architecture. Neither is wholly successful or satisfying, but this may be because both proceed from a premise that's at odds with the contemporary Hollywood mindset. Subtly drawing on Citizen Kane and other mystery-biography movies in the same vein, both movies are about the impossibility of truly understanding another person either as an artist or as a human being. Rather than wrapping everything up in a neat little package, both movies are bundles of loose ends?an assortment of observations and moments that glancingly reinforce one another without coalescing into a vision you can summarize in 25 words or less.
My Architect: A Son's Journey is an HBO production, and like so many documentaries produced for HBO and sister channel Cinemax, it's partly autobiographical?not just a straightforward, PBS-style account of Kahn's work, private life and social impact, but a deeply subjective tale of a son's attempts to understand the dad he never knew.
Kahn, a scarred Jewish Estonian immigrant who died penniless in a Penn Station men's room in 1973, was one of the preeminent American builders of the 20th century. His best-known works include the Trenton Bath House, the Yale Art Gallery, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, the Exeter Library, the Kimbell Art Museum and the National Assembly of Bangladesh. Kahn specialized in buildings that seemed at once monumental and airy?rectilinear mazes diced up by thin, seemingly freestanding walls, windows and partitions meant to allow one to appreciate an entire space even as one was hemmed into a particular part of that space. It's amazing how many of Kahn's buildings look like big versions of his scale models, right down to the wafer-thin walls and partitions.
At the risk of sounding dismissive?which the thoughtful, unsentimental director of My Architect certainly does not deserve?I'm getting a little tired of all these HBO and Cinemax documentaries that find their way into 20th-century history through present-day autobiography. Individually, each film might have some merit, but collectively, they are wearying. There are times, through no fault of Nathaniel Kahn's, when My Architect starts to seem like an episode of Oprah intercut with architectural film clips.
The movie is more interesting and creatively more ambitious when it gets beyond the filmmaker's personal story (which, removing the celebrity-dad angle, isn't all that unusual) and interviews family members, architecture experts and fellow great architects who knew and in some cases, competed against the great man. Their ranks include I.M. Pei, Frank Gehry and Philip Johnson. The latter calls Louis Kahn "the most gifted architect of our time? He was his own artist. He was free compared to me."
But the filmmaker discovers that like Frank Lloyd Wright, Pei and so many other famed builders, his father made structures that were appreciated more as three-dimensional art than for their usefulness as places to live or work. Many of his buildings are afflicted with temperature-control problems, interior-organization issues and a certain forbidding, fortresslike look. A woman who works at Kahn's Richards Medical Research Laboratories at the University of Pennsylvania says that when Kahn devotees come by to photograph the building, "We just sit up in our windows and laugh at them, because this is not a good place to work." (I was reminded that some of the most controlled, visually beautiful filmmakers are somewhat aloof, even inhumane: Stanley Kubrick, for example.) The different sides of the architect's personality seem irreconcilable as well, and Nathaniel Kahn doesn't try to glom them together. His father the great architect doesn't easily match up with his father the inscrutable, often secretive man, who in turn does not mesh with the Shampoo-like lothario who, despite his sexual dishonesty, was catnip to the ladies.
A House on a Hill is just as respectful of the contradictions in its fictional architect hero, Henry. The movie tries to get inside its head, and redoubles its own efforts through the character of a documentary filmmaker (Laura San Giacomo) who's making a movie about Henry's attempts to jumpstart his long-abandoned home-building project. But it (perhaps deliberately) fails to summarize Henry's personality, much less his motives. House is quiet and introspective, scored with a contemplative mix of jazz, pop standards and classical (including Philip Glass and Aaron Copland, whose music also appears in My Architect). It maintains such exquisite distance from its emotionally impenetrable hero that it comes off as more content to be a dream of a drama than a drama. With its dry, hip sense of humor and graceful forward momentum, it feels superficially commercial?at times the tone suggests a film by Fred Schepisi (Six Degrees of Separation) or Bob Fosse (All That Jazz).
But don't be fooled: House is the most artistically adventurous drama in theaters right now, thanks mainly to writer-director Workman's unusual attempts to slice up cinematic space like an architectural draftsman mentally rebuilding a structure that is already finished. Workman deploys a dizzying array of devices that somehow comment on the drama without disrupting it, from split-screen effects to irises to extreme horizontal and vertical mattes. Some of the mattes zoom in to or out of different sections of a wide shot, highlighting key objects and suggesting either emotional proximity to (or distance from) a character. Even when the movie doesn't achieve greatness as drama, it never fails to dazzle, often through inventive visuals that would be the centerpiece of other movies but are throwaways here. (As Henry tries to remember the details of a dream house whose elusive design he can no longer recall, Workman zooms into a single pane of glass in a picture window, then does a Robert Altman-style zoom-out that reveals the pane is just one in a field.)
Workman, who co-directed the documentary The Source, but whose best-known works are his quick-cut montages for the Oscars, thinks like both a visual artist and a musician. Few contemporary directors have such a keen sense of rhythm, or such an apparently instinctive ability to judge a shot both for dramatic context and inherent visual power. He's one of the most influential film editors of the past 50 years, up there with Fosse's regular collaborator, Alan Heim, and Francis Coppola's most important editor and sound designer, the great Walter Murch (The Conversation, Apocalypse Now).
Throughout, Workman seems ruefully aware of the impermanence not just of blueprints or buildings, but of movies and dreams. In a revealing moment, Henry admits to being an insomniac who once awoke in the middle of the night, wrote down his whole life history and then lost it. The movie about Henry's condition seems to have been designed around this hopeless yet oddly romantic anecdote. House pines for permanence in work and life that cannot be attained. It is a movie continually (visually) trying to get a fix on itself and failing. That failure is its subject.
The Party's Over opens Fri., Oct. 24, at City Cinemas Village East, 181 2nd Ave. (betw. 11th & 12th Sts.), 212-529-6998.
Philip Seymour Hoffman, the veteran actor best known for off-kilter character parts, has finally been given a classic everyman role. There's just one catch: The film is a documentary.
Hoffman, 36, serves as protagonist and guide in The Party's Over, a documentary by Donovan Leitch and Rebecca Chaiklin set against the 2000 presidential election. It's a sequel of sorts to The Last Party, the same filmmakers' 1993 political documentary, which saw audience-surrogate Robert Downey Jr. cast a hypersardonic eye on the electoral process, gradually swapping disinterest for manic passion.
As Clinton's second term came to a close, Leitch and Chaiklin thought the time was right for a follow-up. Downey was chronically unavailable, and they wanted a different host anyway, so they approached Hoffman. He turned out to be a good choice?not in spite of his previously apathetic attitude toward politics, but because of it.
"I wasn't much of a voter in my 20s," says Hoffman, interviewed last week by New York Press. "I think I was probably like a lot of people of my generation. Through high school and college I didn't feel that a lot of that stuff really had much to do with me. You look at pictures of people voting, or you look at who's going into a voting booth, it's not a bunch of 18-year-old kids."
But Hoffman enjoys learning new things. So in the spirit of documentary filmmaking as the continuation of school by other means, he signed up to front The Party's Over.
In the movie, a camera crew follows Hoffman across America as he visits politicians in Washington and at campaign stops, attends the Democratic and Republican conventions, talks with many well-known political and quasi-political figures. He attends both the Democratic convention and an alternative political convention that's taking place simultaneously. He goes to Farm Aid. He checks in on a gun show in Maryland, hears former NRA president Charlton Heston hoist a rifle and declare, "From my cold, dead hands!" and listens as gun traders wax poetic on the Second Amendment. He talks to Jesse Jackson and Noam Chomsky. He watches Pat Robertson speak to the Republican convention.
In contrast to the Downey movie, which was a ruminative, entertainingly self-indulgent portrait of an actor turned loose on politics, Hoffman is more of a blend-into-the-woodwork sort. Sometimes he asks questions, other times he just listens and watches. His relaxed concentration has a tonic effect on the film; it encourages viewers to pay close attention to subjects they thought were familiar, on the off chance that they might hear something fresh.
"If you saw the first movie, you know [Leitch and Chaiklin] come at this material with a certain point-of-view and they want to get their point of view across," says Hoffman of The Last Party, an unabashed Go Liberals! movie. "I didn't want this movie to be my opinion about politics, and I didn't really want it to represent any one opinion. I wanted it to be representative of a lot of people's opinions. I really wanted to be more of an observer who's there to ask questions and respond to what's going on." The filmmakers, says Hoffman, "tried hard to make me more than that. I kind of fought it."
Although Hoffman could certainly be classified as a liberal, he doesn't tip his political hand during the documentary, even when firearm collectors are giving him the hard sell on the virtues of gun ownership. "Those guys were really interesting to me," Hoffman says. "They had real passion for what they believed."
Hoffman's performance (if one can describe an appearance in a documentary as a "performance") is more complex than the film itself, an MTV-style political-survey-with-attitude that often slants its observations by photographing liberals in a neutral way while reflexively making conservatives seem scary. During Robertson's speech, the camera alternates super-tight profile closeups of his eyes and mouth?visual shorthand for "crazy person" or "evil dictator."
Yet Hoffman never loses his bemused poker face. He nods and listens even when reputable politicians admit, with startling candor, that 80 percent of a politician's job consists of raising money and kissing ass, another 19 percent is eaten up by struggles against opponents, leaving about one percent for political victories, many of which are so compromised that they're tough to celebrate. As Tim Robbins complains to Hoffman early in the movie, quoting a Nader applause line, "the only difference" between Democrats and Republicans "is the velocity with which their knees hit the ground when corporate sponsors come knocking."
"I think if you really want to captivate people, tell them something they don't know," Hoffman says. "I really believe that's true. I think that's the way to interest people in things they're not already experts on. I also think the whole idea of someone having really definite opinions on anything is pretty suspect. I feel like there's no way one person can know enough about any subject, one subject, to be able to definitively say, 'I feel this way and nothing can change my mind.' I watch these guys on cable yelling over some issue and it seems false to me. It seems like an act. You never see a guy on one of those shows saying, 'You know, I never thought of it that way.'
"While we were shooting, there were a lot of times where I'd be interviewing somebody and realizing I'd kind of made up my mind about them already. At that point I'd have to stop myself and say, okay, would all this seem so ridiculous if I could walk in this guy's shoes? Everybody has reasons for believing what they believe. It's not always an ignorant, stupid reason. Sometimes it's a good reason. I felt the need to keep saying, 'I don't know, I don't know, I don't know.' I feel like if we ever think that we know, then that's the problem."