Sydney Pollack's Sketches Of Frank Gehry belongs unashamedly to the "let us now praise great men" school of hagiography. An accomplished character actor and middling middlebrow auteur, Pollack maintains a respectful distance from his friend and subject, architect Frank Gehry. No surprise that fawning reverence seldom leads to penetrating insights. After all, how much weaker would Crumb have been had director Terry Zwigoff decided against possibly offending his old pal R. Crumb by delving into his tormented upbringing or sexual quirks?
Pollack's loving tribute alternates between grimy digital-video footage of Gehry and his friends and admirers, and sumptuous film footage that lovingly caresses every curve of Gehry's fantastical buildings, which look like they're assembled from flubber and pixie dust instead of steel and concrete. Gehry's whimsical creations suggest a collaboration between Picasso and Dr. Seuss, and the rapturous shots of light reflecting just so on his shimmering surfaces qualify as architectural porn of the first order.
Gehry is a fascinating subject, a strangely magnetic combination of rumpled, aw-shucks humility and Herculean ambition and hubris, but every time Pollack stumbles onto a fascinating topic like Gehry's battles with anti-Semitism, he pulls away instead of delving deeper. Pollack might think he's being objective in allowing a sole opponent of Gehry's work to briefly interrupt the lovefest. But the simpering detractor conveys all the dignity and intellectual authority of Arnold Stang, and his mealy-mouthed criticisms are vague to the point of being meaningless. Scattered throughout Sketches are some interesting insights into the creative process and the tricky business of balancing art and commerce. But they're outnumbered by unenlightening testimonials to Gehry's genius from people like Julian Schnabel, whose white bathrobe and shades make him look like the pompous art-world answer to Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski. A famous quote holds that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. Now Pollack has made an overly reverent but intermittently compelling homage to an iconoclastic genius whose architecture dances.