He looks so harmless. With those big, expressive eyes and white hair, that soft, sagging face, he's the grandfather who'd always slip you a buck for the ice-cream man. But let Frank Gehry design a building, and look out! "This has to get crankier," he says in this documentary, as he affixes a crumpled sheet of paper to the model of a building in progress. After he and his team have weirded-out the model with numerous curves and corrugations, Gehry—the architect of this moment, perhaps of this era—sits back, satisfied. "That's so stupid-looking, it's great."
So An Inconvenient Truth this isn't.
It's an affectionate portrait of the architect responsible for some of the world's most beautiful, out-there, controversial structures: the titanium-clad eruptions of his Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA and his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain; the description-defying Experience Music Project in Seattle. (He designed the hotly debated Alzheimer's center planned for Downtown Las Vegas.)
Gehry's good friend, director Sydney Pollack, troops an impressive roster of architects, modern artists and clients in front of his camera to say nice, sometimes meaningful things about Gehry. And Pollack coaxes some good stuff from his notoriously cranky subject, including an admission that he begins most projects in a state of creative uncertainty, fearful that he's lost his mojo and won't know how to create a building. Especially enlightening are the passages that explain how Gehry uses vanguard design software to dream up previously unseen collisions of form.
But what we don't get close enough to—although it's praised often enough—is the visionary chance-taking ability that drives Gehry to risk the ugly in search of the chaotic sublime. That is, the heart of his, or, really, anyone's creativity. In the film he discusses his design for the Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem (completion date: 2008). As he dawdles over the model, with its biomorphic shapes, weird coils and massive, turbine-like central hall, you understand that the building will demand an act of tolerance—that it's a challenge and an idea as much as a building. Sketches of Frank Gehry shows us that transgressive genius but doesn't quite take us inside of it. Perhaps it can't.
The closest we come is in an anecdote from writer/architect Charles Jencks. He recalls when Gehry, at his Santa Monica home, went in the bathroom to shave; but it was too dark; so Gehry used a hammer to smash a hole in the wall, letting in enough light. Folks, there you have it.