When documentaries focus on a subject that's dead and gone, filmmakers often must rely on secondary interviews and old footage. Using this format, it's easy to despair and see your options as limited. One solution is for the filmmaker to insert himself into the story. Of course, that's trusting he has an interesting approach, and is at least as charismatic as the subject.
Nathaniel Kahn's Oscar-nominated My Architect not only repeats the now-familiar approach, but does so in a transparent, uninspiring manner.
Taking a cue from Ross McElwee's groundbreaking Sherman's March (1984) and its many imitators, Kahn sets off to discover something about his father, innovative architect Louis I. Kahn, who died in 1974.
Kahn is one of three children his father had out of wedlock with three women. His father spent the occasional weekend with Nathaniel, but never lived regularly with him and died when Nathaniel was 11.
Kahn journeys around the world, looking at his father's buildings and interviewing people he knew. The film does a remarkable job of showing us why Louis Kahn was so acclaimed in the architecture community. It also uses lovely photography to capture the buildings' strange beauty and stunning use of air, light, brick and glass.
But Kahn is not a gifted interviewer, and the film doesn't teach us everything it could. In one scene, he visits one of his father's designs, a massive metal ship that turns into a stage, and talks with the captain who knew his father. Kahn holds back on revealing his identity. When he finally breaks the news, the captain unabashedly weeps in front of the camera. It's an old, cheap shot at sentiment.
With his lack of presence, Kahn can't lure us into his world as easily as McElwee or, heaven help us, Michael Moore can. He frequently retreats back into his own wants and needs, exploring questions which he can't make us care about.
As the film ends, Kahn's voice-over tries to make us believe that his search is over and that he feels closer to his father, but it feels like a stretch. It's almost as if Kahn has built even more of a wall between his father and himself; the two parts of the film are so hugely divergent.
Louis comes across as a brilliant, obsessed workaholic while Nathaniel comes across as confused and directionless. No amount of closing narration can change that mood.
To put a point on it, without Nathaniel's famous father as its subject, the aimless My Architect would never have seen the light of day.