"Hey, Martin, what are we doing here?"
"What are you talking about?"
"Look I get it, alright. Just don't fight it."
"Hey, it's what you wanted, right?"
I wonder if the David Greig stage play that writer/director Matt Tauber bases his new film The Architect upon featured two boys engaging in a particularly sweaty act of sodomy on the roof of an especially nasty public housing project. Tauber's film has so many subplots, earnest, well-meaning characters, and think-tank-style babble about how "oppressive" design can warp the souls of slum-dwellers that if it were an afterschool special, the daytime Emmy committee would probably suffer whiplash trying to find a category to honor its painfully good intentions.
Come to think of it, the teen sodomy scene was probably lifted pretty much intact from the Scottish stage version, although Tauber, with the assistance of the Sundance Institute, has added some choice Americanizing touches: the boy doing the inserting is a white, squeaky-clean teen, Martin (Sebastian Stan), whose backdoor buddy is an impeccably well-mannered black dude, Shawn (Paul James), with very white taste: Tolstoy, John Denver and Martin. Yes, friends, John Denver's "Country Roads" comes wafting out of Shawn's patched-together transistor radio, and that's not a bad thing.
The Martin/Shawn rooftop affair could have escaped any scorn from this corner if Tauber had only been willing to afford it the proper screentime, instead of forcing his lovely, sweaty boys to squeeze their act between a virtual carnival of competing attractions: a wife, Julia (Isabella Rossellini), who discovers that after 20 years, she can no longer abide her architect hubby's table manners; the hubby, Leo (Anthony LaPaglia), a firm believer in his profession being able to provide not only shelter but a guide to good living; and a fearsome housing activist, Tonya (Viola Davis), who is hounding Leo to demolish the squalid towers he designed to replicate a French ideal of urban utopia, but which after a couple of decades have inspired mostly despair and drug-dealing. Throw in Leo's blonde teen daughter Christina (Hatyden Panettiere), in search of her inner Britney while ducking bad hugs from dad; an upwardly-mobile black daughter, Cammie (Serena Reeder), who finds Tonya's politics and home cooking a bit too gauche for her new lifestyle with a surrogate family of wealthy African-American professionals; and her hip new "brother," to replace her biological sibling who died jumping from the very towers Toyna wants to demolish. The Architect quickly devolves from hip, idealistic ensemble piece to mostly soapy goulash for the politically correct.
Back to our sweaty boys. There's plenty of unexplored potential in truly odd-couple match-ups, and closeted, white, rich man's son meets articulate, sensitive black teen who's totally off the hiphop grid could have anchored a much better movie. Classically trained newcomer Sebastian Stan (seen recently as the pranky white boyfriend in the Chinese/American comedy Red Doors) is lovely to look at in an almost Gallic fashion: soulful eyes, big hair, high forehead and a born performer's ability to just live in the moment, creating at least the illusion of an inner life. Paul James shines as a painfully sincere inner-city gay teen earnestly persuading Martin and us that he digs John Denver over 50 Cent. Oh, what a paradise it might have been — until Martin and Shawn's passionate rutting is rudely linked to Tonya's mission to knock down the project. A stiff prick and a wrecking ball shouldn't have to shack up on the same throbbing metaphor.