Pollock (2000)

reviewed by
Harvey S. Karten


POLLOCK

Reviewed by Harvey Karten Sony Pictures Classics Director: Ed Harris Writer: Barbara Turner, Susan J. Emshwiller, based on the book "Jackson Pollock: An American Saga" by Steven Naifeh Cast: Ed Harris, Marcia Gay Harden, Amy Madigan, Jennifer Connelly, Jeffrey Tambor, Bud Cort, John Heard, Val Kilmer

Those who go to see "Pollock" without knowing much about art (but knowing what they like) will be tempted at its conclusion to ask the customary pair of questions about painters: 1) Do you have to be nuts to be a great, creative artist? (Van Gogh cut off his ear, you remember, consistent with his production of terrific, violent works.) 2) Can't my seven-year-old do that modern stuff with his fingerpainting set?

Writing and movies are my passion, not colors that stand still on canvas, so I'm afraid I can't give you the definitive answer to either query. I'm tempted after seeing Carlos Saura's imaginative film which opened just weeks before this one, "Goya in Bordeaux" that a heck of a lot of painters are not the happiest most stable of people...after all Goya, known as the first modern painter, was racked by headaches, and regularly hallucinated about his miserable later years. In fact Saura's morbid opening scene, that of a large carcass of meat hanging in a slaughterhouse, stands in perhaps for Goya's notion that this is just about all that human beings are or will become.

Let me make an assumption about the audience for "Pollock." Some, of course, will be art mayvens, a few in particular fans of the boldly innovative style that Jackson Pollock used when he split with Picasso, Miro and other abstract painters and became (like Al Gore) his own man. Most will go because they heard that Ed Harris is giving the performance of his career, an almost sure bet for an Academy nomination. Having quickly and deliberately gained thirty pounds (as well as growing a beard) for just part of the story--the portion that shows how dissipated the depressive painter had become--kind of shows you the commitment the actor had which led to his monumental performance. That Mr. Harris is the director surely added to his motivation.

Using a script that Barbara Turner and Susan J. Emshwiller carved out from the Steven Naifeh bio "Jackson Pollock: An American Saga," Harris takes us through the ups and downs in the man's all-too-brief life, and while the director is not too modest to chew up the scenery, he certainly introduces us to a LOT of characters--as though inspired by Alan Rudolph's "Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle"--about yet another unhappy creative person and her wide circle of friends. While there are occasional flights into fiction--Pollock's most famous little quote, "I am nature" is uttered here in answer to his wife's insistence that one has to paint from nature and not about mere abstract visions--when in fact he had said this to someone else.

Opening toward the end of the subject's life, photographer Lisa Rinzler closes in on the artist as a wasted man, his eyes gazing sadly into space to expose his emptiness after he had realized that the best is not yet to come. Having spent a good part of his life as a drunk (we catch a scene of the man crawling up to his fifth-floor walkup in Greenwich Village in 1941 after a night on the town), Pollock had given up the sauce for two years, but went off the wagon in a fit of self- loathing when, during an episode in which he was being filmed for a documentary, he realized that he no longer had it. He had been overtaken by still greater painters and was no longer the world's golden boy. His most important relationship is with the woman who would become his wife, a major painter named Lee Krasner--evoked with a stunning performance by Marcia Gay Harden . Just weeks after inviting Pollock to her studio around the corner, the two begin to live together until Kranser insists that they marry. She would live to have no small number of reasons to regret the decision, given her man's fits of anger in which he would overthrow a table full of food while entertaining family and friends. (Allegedly Pollock's explosions were cover-ups for his alarming sensitivity--which persistently led him in the direction of reclusiveness much like Sean Connery's fictional writer, Forrester.)

If Pollock were a conventional painter sitting at an easel, scenes of the man at work would hardly make for interesting intervals. But once Pollock chucked cubist-like abstractions for his unique style--he would lay his huge canvas on the floor and, without touching the brush to the cloth would almost violently drip the paint onto the material. This led to a succession of dots which, put together, would represent a unique American style. Since quiet moments are quite often broken up by fits of rage and given that the discharge of the artist at his work is fierce, Ed Harris has the opportunity throughout the two-hours to deliver nothing short of an athletic performance well suited for Oscar consideration. A fine supporting cast including Jeffrey Tambor as the critic who becomes his pal and in effect leading publicist; Jennifer Connelly as his young and energetic girl friend, and especially Amy Madigan (Harris's real-life wife) as the wealthy and idiosyncratic Peggy Guggenheim adds to the vivid texture of the work.

Not Rated. Running time: 117 minutes. (C) 2000 by Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com


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