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Susan Granger's review of "POLLOCK" (Sony Pictures Classics)
Actor/director Ed Harris's wrenching study of Jackson Pollock, one of the greatest American painters of the 20th century, reveals him as a complex, pathological alcoholic. In the late 1940s, Pollock thrust "splatter" abstractionism into modern art and then drank himself into misery, finally perishing in a car wreck. During his rise to fame and fortune, the notoriously self-promoting, yet inwardly self-doubting, Pollock met up with feisty, tough-talking fellow painter Lee Krasner (Marcia Gay Harden) when he was living in Greenwich Village and, together, they moved to rural Long Island. Their domestic arrangement was far from tranquil and, eventually, Pollock acquired a younger trophy, Ruth Kligman (Jennifer Connelly), while Krasner emerges as a bitter, enabling wife. From his lying on the grass staring at the sky and clamming in East Hampton to his precise methodology of drip-painting canvases and his drunken revels at Jungle Pete's, the watering hole near his home - Pollock's abusive, mercurial life is up there on the screen. The weakness is in the simplistic, sequential screenplay with its cliche-ridden exposition and dialogue, along with its lack of character insight, by Barbara Turner and Susan J. Emshwiller. Val Kilmer lends support as rival artist Willem de Kooning, as does Amy Madigan (the real-life wife of Harris) as idiosyncratic heiress Peggy Guggenheim, with Bud Cort as her art scout, and Jeffrey Tambour as art critic Clement Greenberg. Kudos to cinematographer Liza Rinzler, production designer Mark Friedberg and costumer David Robinson for the evocation of the '40s-'50s era. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, "Pollock" is a stylish 7, distinguished by Oscar-caliber performances by Ed Harris, Marcia Gay Harden and Amy Madigan.
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