The Architect

I generally love low key, low budget, indie cinema, but despite all of its unglamorous charms, The Architect is just too schmaltzy and sour to really be worthwhile. The film stars Anthony LaPaglia as a wealthy architect whose family is on the brink of imploding and Viola Davis as a woman fighting to demolish what she deems as functionally corrupt buildings in Eden Courts, her public housing project home. She pursues the building’s architect (the aforementioned LaPaglia character) and the two engage in some really well done moments of culture clashing. When she confronts him about how the buildings lend themselves to gang intimidation and help to permit crime in her neighborhood, he simply launches into a lecture about the buildings’ origins in French architecture and concludes that he cannot help her because they are “structurally sound.” Unfortunately, even with its brief 81 minute runtime this film still feels overly padded with other storylines such as the architect’s crumbling marriage and his children’s unrelated sexual explorations. Its tangents are predictable and unnecessary, killing any and all momentum established in the film’s more solid scenes. The movie is almost worth a quick look for the quality material here, but I cannot recommend that anyone sit through this film to the ridiculous and overdramatic end.

Grade: C+