Movie Review: The Architect (2016)

My wife and I decided to enjoy a movie night together earlier this week, something we haven’t done in quite some time. Thanks to the YouTube algorithm—through machine learning YouTube knows I’m an architect—the trailer for the 2016 indie film The Architect popped up as recommendation to watch. I previously saw the trailer (in a real movie theater) upon its initial release but never got around to seeing the movie until now.

The IMDb synopsis for The Architect succinctly captures the entire gist of the screenplay by Catherine DiNapoli and Jonathan Parker, so I’ll simply regurgitate it here:

“When a couple sets out to build their dream house, they enlist the services of a visionary modernist architect, whose soaring ideas are matched only by his ego. The woman is swept away by this uncompromising creative artist whose personality provides a stark contrast to her practical husband’s. She is so taken she hardly notices the architect is building HIS dream house.”

In addition to co-writing the screenplay, Jonathan Parker directed the movie. Parker Posey and Eric McCormack play the married couple, Drew and Colin, respectively. She is an impetuous, aspiring ceramics artist, while he is a pragmatically minded financial planner. The characters appear to be 40-somethings: Knowing her clock is ticking, Drew wants to have a baby, but suffering from low libido Colin pointedly avoids sex. They seem well-to-do, though not so much so that their marriage is not threatened by (among other matters) the spiraling costs of the custom home designed by the architect Miles Moss, portrayed by actor James Frain.

 

Parker Posey, Eric McCormack, and James Frain in a still from the movie The Architect.

Spoiler alert: No one will mistake The Architect for one of cinematic history’s great masterpieces. Citizen Kane this is not. The Architect trots out well-worn tropes such as—in the words of two reviewers—the architect as “a vain, imperious, pseudo-intellectual, budget-busting, [scarf] wearing, wife stealer in the classic Frank Lloyd Wright mode,” and the wife and husband as “a pair of prosperous married suburbanites [who] try to paper over their differences” by commissioning the pompous avant-garde architect. The plot line is entirely predictable. The characters are very thinly drawn. The Architect clearly aspired to be at once both funny and serious but fails by most measures as either a comedy or a drama. The fact it did not enjoy a long run in theaters comes as no surprise. Nevertheless, I did find The Architect entertaining and worth a viewing for reasons I’ll now discuss.

Firstly, The Architect is different and noteworthy precisely because a principal protagonist is an architect. His character is not an architect only because the trappings of the occupation provide a stylish set of backdrops the movie’s producers liked. There’s an overabundance of architects as characters in movies (i.e. Keanu Reeves in The Lake House, Wesley Snipes in Jungle Fever, Liam Neeson in Love Actually, Tom Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle—Hollywood likes the idea of what they think an architect is) but most often the fact they are architects is secondary to the movie’s storyline. I like seeing a movie that features an architect being an architect, whose work figures prominently in the telling of the story.

Additionally, though many will undoubtedly regard Miles Moss to be an over-the-top caricature, there’s more than enough that is recognizably true-to-life. The real world has more than its share of Miles Moss analogues. In addition to Frank Lloyd Wright, the ego-driven pretensions and affectations of Daniel Libeskind, Bjarke Ingels, and Patrik Schumacher immediately come to mind. More than a few of Miles’ supercilious, cliched utterances sound too much like words spoken by actual architects. Here’s a compilation: 

• “There will never be a great architect without a great client.”
• “Never let yourself be overwhelmed by a rational analysis. When we’re talking about a house, a room, a space, it’s not something that you think, it’s something that you feel.”
• “A house shouldn’t be on the hill . . . it should be of the hill. Hill and house living, each the happier for the other.”
• “Rationalism is the enemy of art but is necessary as a basis for architecture.”
• “I believe it is just as important to design a chicken coop as it is a cathedral."
• “I don’t know why people hire architects and then tell them what to do. With a painter or a sculptor, you wouldn’t dare suggest alternatives, but an architect has to put up with anything! Often the opinion of the client must be disregarded for his own good. Less is only more when more is no good.”

My profession deserves its occasional comeuppance, especially when too many practitioners are guilty of the same exaggerated self-importance and arrogance expressed by Miles Moss. In this respect, The Architect successfully parodies the egocentric archetype personified by Gary Cooper’s portrayal of the megalomaniacal architect Howard Roark in The Fountainhead. For what it’s worth, I regard The Fountainhead as bombastic, pretentious, and quite unintentionally humorous as any movie I’ve ever seen. 

Finally, though many reviewers did not, I found The Architect consistently funny when it wanted to be. This is mostly because I simply enjoy seeing moviemakers lampoon architects, so my amusement threshold is admittedly low. Perhaps it’s telling that as a Canadian I likewise revel in movies that satirize Canada and Canadian-ness. Self-deprecation and being able to laugh at oneself is a virtue all of us should cultivate.

Do I recommend The Architect? Sure, if decidedly lightweight fare and a breezy way to pass a couple of idle hours is what you’re looking for. As I said, it’s by no means a great movie but I found it worth my time. I give it a solid three out of five stars.

One of the IMBd reviewers suggested the 1948 film Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House (starring Cary Grant, Myrna Loy, and Melvyn Douglas) as a better, funnier alternative to The Architect. I’ll have to check it out.