Intentionally or not, Scott Hicks'
documentary Glass: A Portrait Of Philip In Twelve Parts makes a good companion piece to his
breakthrough film, Shine, right down to the way that Philip Glass even looks a little like Shine star Geoffrey Rush. But where Shine was about a musician battling
mental illness and an up-and-down career in order to share his interpretation
of the classics, Glass is about a down-to-Earth, commercially successful composer who made his
reputation by creating a signature sound that once seemed avant-garde, but has
now been absorbed into the mainstream. Also, where Shine was visually beautiful and aspired
to the poetic, Glass looks flat and feels scattered.
Those
looking for a cohesive documentary portrait of Philip Glass will have to hope
that some other filmmaker comes along someday and makes better use of Hicks'
footage. In the meantime, Glass
should suit those willing to accept a fitfully insightful look at one of the
most intriguing figures in late-20th-century American culture. Love or hate
Glass' music and its curious pervasiveness, his story says a lot about the
shifting fortunes of the New York art world in the '70s and '80s. At the end of
the '60s, Glass was just another highbrow hippie, exploring symphonic
repetition by taking advantage of the psychedelic set's tolerance for drone. By
the mid-'70s, he was mounting an opera at the Met, and becoming well-known
enough that a New Yorker
cartoonist could build a gag around him. A decade later, he was providing music
for movies and commercials.
And yet while Glass reveals him as a low-key,
thoughtful, and largely unpretentious fellow, Hicks' decision to divide the
documentary into 12 vignettes keeps him from grasping the full scope of Glass'
life and career. Hicks devotes segments to fairly straightforward, mundane
studies of Glass' family, his spiritual explorations, and his workaholic ways,
but the actual biography only comes through sporadically, without much critical
or historical context. Hicks might think he's mirroring Glass' own working
methods, which borrow from Allen Ginsberg's philosophy of "first thought, best
thought," but Glass' end results tend to be more polished. As fascinating as Glass often is, it's simultaneously too
conventional and not conventional enough.