During his guest appearance on The Simpsons, Frank Gehry, architect of such dizzying structures as the Guggenheim Gallery in Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA, is seen using a casually crumpled- up ball of paper as the basis for his next great design.
This interesting, if unadventurous, documentary implies that the real Gehry operates in a similar way to his cartoon counterpart. Indeed, at one stage he actually suggests that inspiration can come from examining the inside of a wastepaper basket.
At such turns one is tempted to dismiss the architect, a 78-year-old Canadian, long in California, as a nincompoop of the most pretentious order. But the film does offer much visual evidence as to his defiantly eccentric genius. The swoops and bends of the Guggenheim manage the tricky business of combining harmony and balance with a cunningly fabricated approximation of randomness. This is a very singular artist.
Sydney Pollack, by way of contrast, has always been the most conventional of movie directors. In the decades since delivering Tootsie, his one undisputed classic, films such as Out of Africa and Havana have delivered greater quantities of boredom to the world than that served up by the works of Dire Sraits.
Still, the two men are close friend,s and when Pollack suggested that somebody should make a film about Gehry, the architect urged Sid to take on the task himself.
What we have ended up with is a perfectly respectable series of talking heads interspersed with location footage of Gehry's buildings. Hal Foster, a professor at Princeton, does dare to question Frank's deity, but for the most part the participants are breathlessly enthusiastic about the architect's odd work.
Hats of to Bob Geldof, who manages to talk with characteristic forthrightness about the structures and whose presence - two Irish rock duffers being, surely, at least one too many - precludes an appearance by Bono.
DONALD CLARKE
