In The Architect, Anthony LaPaglia gives a subtle yet textured performance as Leo Waters, a self-important middle-aged architect who lives with his quietly dysfunctional family in the suburbs of Chicago. Waters, who designed the low-income Eton Court Homes at the start of his career, has moved on to bigger and better projects of course, as the buildings deterioriate over decades of abuse and neglect in a tough South Side neighborhood. The conditions of the drug- and gang-infested buildings leave Tonya Neeley, played by Viola Davis, no choice but to organize the tenants to support her mission: she wants the city to tear the buildings down. No amount of sprucing up will amount to anything; the only answer is to wipe them away completely.
Tonya's rage simmers beneath the surface as she plies her neighbors with homemade banana bread and steely determination. Gangs run the elevators, and mold, asbestos, and rats, along with other social ills are part and parcel of daily existence for the tenants of the blighted buildings. Tonya, played masterfully by Davis, is tortured by her own demons: her teenage son jumped to his death from the top of one of the buildings. She has sent her 15-year-old daughter to live with an affluent family in the suburbs while an older daughter and a granddaughter remain with her at Eton.
Tonya does her research and tracks Leo down, landing in his architecture class at Northwestern where she confronts him about the campaign she's mounted to tear the buildings down. Leo, coming off of a lecture on Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of human needs, seems genuinely shocked that Eton Court Homes, a project inspired by the architecture of Le Corbusier, could have slid into such disrepair. Initially, he offers to help her speed up requests for repairs, but ultimately decides to rethink the buildings and what might be done to update and improve them. Meanwhile, Leo's sexually conflicted son Martin, played by Sebastian Stan, decides to check the neighborhood out for himself, a journey that will inexorably jar his senses and identity.
Tonya visits Leo's gorgeous home to check out Leo's new model for Eton, a series of cosmetic tweaks that don't address the fundamental problems. When Leo's wife Julia, played by Isabella Rossellini, discovers that he hasn't visited Eton Court to see for himself what the conditions are, we are treated to the full extent of her anguish and marital unhappiness. Julia's indignant eruption catches Leo off-guard, and in a rare display of traditional role-playing that I haven't noticed in a contemporary film for quite some time, Leo exclaims: "You're my wife, you're supposed to support me." Right.
The always luminous Rosselini is awash in despair, anger, and alienation and we see she has lost herself in marriage and will come clean shortly thereafter, announcing her plans for separation. For his part, Leo is fully out of touch with his wife, yearning for the happy-go-lucky early days of their marriage. Their kids, however, saw it all coming.
The couple share a complete lack of knowledge of their children, or at least a relevant connection and pertinent information. Leo thinks Martin is interested in architecture, and the budding beauty 15-year-old Christina, played by Hayden Panettiere, is out until the wee hours driving with a truck driver she meets after nearly being assaulted at a college bar. Both are drowning and lost, loved, but seemingly abandoned amid their parents' false expectations and vaguely set about finding their own identities and connections.
Leo eventually visits the buildings, signs Tonya's petition and the city agrees to tear down the buildings, but not before another suicide takes place. After his turnabout, Tonya tells Leo, "You wanted me to tell you you're a good man." Leo responds, "Yes." Tonya says, "I can't tell you that." At the end of the film, after the suicide of a young man who lived at Eton and with whom Martin shares sex, father and son meet up on the rooftop from which the boy jumped. They share a moment of silent recognition.
This tale of two Chicago families--one from the upper-middle class suburbs, one from the projects on the South side--explores a multitude of class, sexual, and political issues with a muscular intensity that grabbed me and asked for my full respect. LaPaglia, star of the popular CBS series "Without a Trace," isn't the only bright spot in this tale of two families, Rosselini is a steady beacon and Davis is a forcefield. LaPaglia "was a real collaborator," director Matt Tauber told me. And Rosselini, who signed onto the project late in the game, "was incredibly brave and dove in with such abandon. She is a deeply maternal and generous actor," he said.
The film, which premiered at Tribeca, already has distribution via Magnolia Pictures and is a fine effort by Tauber, a first-time director, who adapted it from a Scottish play. It took him 10 years to make the film, from adaptation to the final cut. Dallas Mavericks' millionaire Mark Cuban's HDNet Films financed the picture; it specializes in financing for projects of $2 million or less. In backing The Architect, it brought to light a masterwork.
Tauber, whose background is in theater, has his first feature film coming out on June 23 in New York called The Great New Wonderful, which tells 5 disparate stories of people struggling with the 1-year anniversary of 9/11. That film debuted at Tribeca last year; I'm eager to see it having observed the deftness with which he tells the story of The Architect.