| THE ARCHITECT |
 2006 - USADirector: Matt Tauber
- Reviewed by Linda
Anthony LaPaglia and Viola Davis emerge as the central representatives of the two sides in the story. LaPaglia's Leo is an architect, successful, with a beautiful wife, a fancy house (that he designed, of course) and two attractive teenage children. Viola Davis's Tonya is a woman constantly teetering on the edge of rage and complete disillusionment. She lives in a deteriorating low-income housing project that Leo designed way back when as a utopia of dense urban living. Except the utopia has become a hellhole of gangs, violence, and drugs in buildings that are in such bad shape that Tonya is on a crusade to have them all torn down to start over. The two meet when Tonya thinks it could only help if the project's original architect would agree that tearing down and redesigning the whole shebang would be the best thing to do. It is an promising idea for a story, and there is much drama to be had from this backdrop. But The Architect isn't content with sticking to such an interesting volatile social issue as this... it throws in side stories. There's Leo's daughter (Hayden Panettiere), who at 15, is seeking a sort of older man love which may or may not have something to do with her newly perfect breasts and her dad's lingering glances. Leo's son (Sebastian Stan) is a pretty-boy Hayden-Christensen-wannabe who dropped out of college and has his own sexual issues to work out in the guise of an unusual friendship with a young African-American man (Paul James) who lives in the projects. There's Viola's teenage daughter who has gone to life with a middle-class family in order to get out of the bad area of town that may or may not have been responsible for the death of her twin brother a couple years earlier. And there's Isabella Rosellini as Leo's wife, who gets to stare furiously at perfect towers of fruit on her counter and smash expensive flower pots in her rock garden in the middle of the night. Basically everyone is miserable, on the verge of tears, or at least on the verge of lashing out at life—which some of them do, with not the best results. It is the same sort of dreary montage drama that you've seen before (like, say, the Oscar-winner Crash). The thing that The Architect has going for it are a passel of excellent actors, particularly Viola Davis, who simmers as if on the edge of blowing into many tiny bits, and LaPaglia, who brings a seasoned gravity to a man who is not a bad guy, but it pretty clueless on many levels. If the film isn't entirely successful or satisfactory as a drama, and seems a little scared to tackle the many issues that it introduces, it is still worth watching to see Davis and LaPaglia bring the best of their skills to the screen. |
| Home | Currently Playing | For Rent | Video Obsession ©2006 Moviepie e-mail us |
The Architect is a stage-to-screen drama (with ample tweaks, according to the DVD extras) about... about... race problems? poverty issues? class issues? or all of the above?
