Sundance review: 'Aggie' is a fond portrait of an arts patron, but her toughest work gets short shrift

‘Aggie’ 

★★1/2

Playing in the Documentary Premieres section of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 92 minutes.

Screens again: Sunday, Jan. 26, 4 p.m., Redstone 2 (Park City); Monday, Jan. 27, 9:45 p.m., Broadway 3 (Salt Lake City); Friday, Jan. 31, 3 p.m., Temple (Park City); Saturday, Feb. 1, 9 p.m., Resort (Sundance). 

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Being a good person doesn’t automatically make one a good subject for a documentary, as the meandering narrative of “Aggie” unfortunately proves.

The title figure is Agnes Gund, contemporary art collector, philanthropist, president emerita of the board of the Museum of Modern Art and chairwoman of MoMA’s offshoot PS1. She has befriended a great many artists over the years, starting with Roy Lichtenstein in the ‘60s through creative minds today. And, at 82, she seems as energetic and engaged as people half her age.

The problem with “Aggie,” the movie, is that the filmmaker — her daughter, Catherine Gund, who has directed such well-received documentaries as “What’s On Your Plate?” and “Born to Fly: Elizabeth Streb vs. Gravity” — is too close to her subject, for obvious reasons, to extract much unknown information about Agnes. She tries to get around this by catching Agnes in conversation with other people, including radio reporter Maria Hinojosa, auteur John Waters, and three of Agnes’ grandchildren. But none of these “interviewers” dig deep into what makes Agnes tick.

The film’s structure is haphazard, roughly a chronological narrative of Agnes’ life, though taking some side roads into her childhood that don’t do enough to illuminate her work today. And that work — launching the Art and Justice Fund to battle mass incarceration, using the $165 million she got for selling a Lichtenstein painting in 2017 — is far too interesting to be left for the film’s last few minutes. What could have been the grist for an entire movie is treated like an infomercial tagged onto the end of a fond but forgettable portrait.