Discovering Oneself In a Hollywood Vacuum

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The New York Sun

At the heart of the Sundance-brewed indie drama “The Architect” lies a tried-and-true Hollywood formula dating back at least to Frank Capra: Scrappy prole beats down bigwig’s door and speaks truth to power. Power takes the tough counsel to heart, and, by gum, things change.

This being the real world, or at least Chicago according to “The Architect,” you won’t hear bells ringing at the end. The bigwig is just an upper-middle-class white architect and teacher, Leo (Anthony LaPaglia), prideful about a public housing project he designed years ago. Tonya Neeley (Viola Davis), who is black, is a mother and self-started activist who lives in the drug-infested buildings. She wants them demolished and replaced, and seeks Leo’s endorsement on a petition.

No bells, but you might hear gurgling as you drown in undigested liberal guilt, and the wary conflict between Leo and Tonya is only one ingredient. At the peak of its strenuous labors, “The Architect” cuts from Leo’s son’s first gay encounter, to his body-conscious daughter’s underage bar-hopping, to his wife’s obsessive-compulsive plate-smashing, and to his decision, over dinner, to redesign those pesky projects.

These are the inevitable results that follow from families custom-designed for poignant strain. At the film’s opening, Leo’s son (Sebastian Stan) returns early from college for unspecified reasons; his wife (Isabella Rossellini) pays far too much attention to the precise composition of a bowl of lemons and limes in her kitchen; bust size and boys preoccupy Leo’s daughter (Hayden Panettiere), who sits in on the college classes Dad teaches on architecture. (The film, to no clear effect, makes the point that Dad seems a little interested in her bust size, too.)

“The Architect” hopes to counterpoint these middle-class woes with the more mortal concerns of Tonya’s family, even as it fails to flesh them out as characters. After her son jumped off the roof, she sent one daughter to live with wealthier friends who wear brightly colored sweaters; the young woman dutifully displays ostentatious embarrassment about her mother for our benefit. Another grown daughter sulks in front of the television while ignoring her own baby.

The filmmaker, Matt Tauber, adapted “The Architect” from a play (originally set in Glasgow) and is himself a veteran stage director. Aggravated by laborious editing and clumsy dialogue, his film trudges along with a hand-holding, stagebound monotony. No point comes without its pause, no irony without its parallel, no “moment” without its revelation. (When this sort of silliness happened in the 1940s, we at least got “The Fountainhead,” which is out on DVD if you need a self-serious movie about an architect.)

Even with competent actors like Ms. Davis and Mr. LaPaglia, a movie like this one is an act of ventriloquism on the director’s part: It’s as if one scene-advancing, theme-developing person is voicing all these characters. Mr. LaPaglia breaks free best. His Leo lashes out with wounded complacence both as an architect and, amid marital troubles, as a husband. Ms. Davis, full of life, feels more hemmed in by Mr. Tauber’s lugubrious direction.

Perhaps the movie’s low point is the tryst between Leo’s son and a bookish teen at the projects. While his sister fulfills the indie-movie mandate of underage libido peek-a-boo (with a rangy truck driver, no less), he makes a beeline for his father’s projects to undergo his own sexual self-discovery. “It’s what you wanted, right?” asks the black teen, bent over the roof ledge.

All of which is a waste, because surely there’s a fascinating story to tell, and tell well, about these city-dwellers left behind by the recent extraordinary cycle of urban renewal. Projects like the one in “The Architect” are like perverse time capsules of misguided policy, with very real human consequences. But a single episode of HBO’s “The Wire” has volumes more to say about this or any number of things, than the crammed-full sheaf of good intentions and first-film card calling that is “The Architect.”


The New York Sun

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