Glass: A Portrait Of Philip In Twelve Parts

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1937, Glass grew up working in his father's music store and showed precocious musical aptitude. He studied at the Juilliard School of Music and with renowned composer and teacher Nadia Boulanger in Paris, and settled in New York in the 1960s. Glass and his first wife, experimental theater director JoAnne Akalaitis, quickly became part of a thriving arts scene and he formed the Philip Glass ensemble in 1968. Glass' was still driving a cab to pay the bills when his first opera, Einstein on the Beach, premiered at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1976. But commercial success followed shortly after, and Glass subsequently divided his time between classical compositions and film scores. The film's division into twelve segments self-consciously evokes Glass' four-hour composition "Music in Twelve Parts" (1971–1974), and individual sequences focus on particular aspects of Glass' life: His longtime involvement with Tibetan Buddhism; his marriages to wives Akalaitis, Candy Jeurnigan – a mixed-media artist who died young, of liver cancer -- and Holly Critchlow (second wife Luba Burtyk, a doctor, is never mentioned); his collaborations with filmmakers like Godfrey Reggio and Errol Morris; his relationships with parents and siblings, Sheppie and Marty. But the structure feels artificial and arbitrary, an attempt to spice up a fundamentally dull film.

The trouble with Glass is that his work is more gripping than he is; his natural demeanor is polite reserve and he appears to be telling the truth when he says he's an open book. Hicks' attempts to "humanize" Glass don't work, because Glass just isn't inclined to play to the camera, whether he's talking about his music or puttering around the kitchen of his Cape Breton Island house making pizza. Asked for the secret of his success, he says, "You get up early and you work all day. That's my only secret." Sound advice, but not terribly sexy. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh