NYTimes.com Review 'Pollock'
mod_pol
'Pollock': Frame by Frame, an Action Film
Dripping With Art
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/10/arts/10KIMM.html
December 10, 2000
FILM
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
ED HARRIS'S "Pollock," opening in New York
on Friday, sits atop the
category of biopic that includes Charlton
Heston as the tormented
Michelangelo, Jose Ferrer as the tormented
Toulouse-Lautrec and
Kirk Douglas as the tormented Vincent van
Gogh. Now Mr. Harris, as
the tormented Jackson Pollock, does his part
for the tradition,
upending tables, urinating into a fireplace
and, at his drunkest,
becoming a fluorescent shade of orange that
makes him look even
more like a pumpkin than Al Gore did during
the first presidential
debate.
What would you expect? An artist like
Chardin may be the greatest
still-life painter ever, but no one would
want to see a movie about
a contented Frenchman who spent decade after
decade serenely
painting the same bunch of brown pots and pans.
Movies are movies and paintings are
paintings. Each has its
priorities. Paintings hang on a wall
immobile, but films, including
films about paintings, demand a little
action and it doesn't hurt
if they've got a little Action Painting,
too. Pollock, Action
Painter and manly brute, is the ideal artist
for a movie, if there
is such a thing.
And who cares whether it's strictly
accurate except pedants?
"Pollock" happens to stick pretty close to
the facts. Pollock could
be a nasty alcoholic and depressive. No
other movie about an artist
has been more respectful or respectable in
pure art terms, treating
Pollock as the serious artist he was and
also as a volcanic
character. It's gripping drama. Mr. Harris
and Marcia Gay Harden,
as Pollock's wife, the gifted painter Lee
Krasner, are both
mesmerizing actors. Ms. Harden's Krasner, a
tough, long-suffering
woman who subordinates her career to
supervise her husband's, only
to be ditched by him for someone half her
age, sadly seems
historically right, too.
But a film about an artist doesn't have to
be artistically
instructive or true to history. True to
itself, yes. That's
something else. People who know about
Pollock can enjoy Mr.
Harris's movie as good melodrama, but they
won't exactly learn much
from it in terms of art history, and neither
will people who don't
know Pollock's work, because a movie about
the famous years of a
famous artist can only do certain things well.
It can evoke a period. Mr. Harris goes to
incredible lengths to do
that. The camera lingers over old paint cans
from the 1940's and
cereal boxes from the 50's. To imitate
Pollock, Mr. Harris switched
his cigarette brand to unfiltered Camels and
built a studio in his
backyard in Malibu, where he practiced
painting like Pollock,
mimicking how Pollock looks and moves in the
famous Hans Namuth
photographs and films.
No actor has come vaguely as close to
simulating a real painter
painting as does Mr. Harris (a former art
student, by the way). The
scenes of him pouring looping swirls,
conjuring magic out of thin
air, are beautiful, and they match how
Pollock evidently made
certain famous drip pictures. Likewise, some
of the earlier scenes
are true virtuosity when he puts brush to
canvas, instinctively,
fluently.
Only if you know the pictures of the
photographer and filmmaker
Namuth (played by Norbert Weisser), however,
will you recognize the
special quality of Mr. Harris's simulation.
In fact, it's possible,
if you go in skeptical or ignorant, to come
away even from this
earnest film thinking Pollock, the greatest
American painter of the
second half of the 20th century, was an
interesting man but
artistically a fraud: Jack the Dripper, an
abusive, taciturn
egomaniac supported by a coterie of hothouse
esthetes, a reckless
fatalist who, at 44, drank and drove into a
tree, killing himself
and a young woman, when he came to believe
along with his numerous
detractors that he was a phony.
That's because "Pollock" is, first of all,
a movie about two
people in New York in a mixed-up
relationship who happen to be
artists. It's secondarily, if at all, a
movie about modern art.
Fine. The only thing more deadly on screen
than a lingering,
adorational shot of a painting is somebody
describing a painting in
the usual art-speak. Occasionally the flow
of Mr. Harris's dramatic
narrative comes to a sudden halt when
Krasner or another character
pontificates about the pictures or, worse,
reads reviews of them.
Real reviews. The movie tries but fails in
this way to tell you
what makes Pollock's work great in
historical terms. You have to
see the work in a museum to grasp that.
What movies about art haven't done well
until this movie, on the
other hand, is to evoke the creative process realistically.
Compared with almost everyone else who has
tried to translate to
the screen this slow, cerebral, mostly
invisible phenomenon, Mr.
Harris, as a first-time director as well as
a producer and actor,
manages far better than most to suggest the
doubt, fear, time and
sheer boredom involved. There are
Hollywood-style eureka moments
that aren't believable, but the movie also
has stretches of
valuable, poetic, communicative silence.
In between the flip-outs and benders, we
see Pollock gradually
inspired in a plausible sense to invent a
new way of painting, not
just in the usual melodramatic Hollywood
sense that an artist is
inspired.
He is inspired by his intelligence, beneath
the brutish exterior;
by his physical absorption in the act of
painting, which looks
cathartic; and by his intense competition
with other artists and
his desire to please his mother, although
these relationships are
just hinted at. Also by insecurity and an
appetite for fame: normal
motivations. "Pollock" shows that artists,
even great artists, are
driven not just by madness and genius.
A friend of mine, another art critic, also
found the movie well
acted and memorable but not surprising,
knowing Pollock's story
during the 40's and 50's, and he wondered
what it would have been
like to see a movie about Pollock that
wasn't dedicated to familiar
material but dealt with his early days, when
Pollock was a
bottled-up boy from a dysfunctional, big
Western family, living in
California, who then moved East with nothing
much going for him
except ambition and deeply buried talent.
That might have made for a more
unconventional film about an even
more complicated subject.
But American moviegoers want their artists
to be big, famous,
misunderstood, troubled Romantics,
preferably suicidal. In other
words, remote from them. Exotic. Entertaining.
Titanic.
"Pollock" should exceed their
expectations.
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