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Pollock film review
POLLOCK
Running time: 122 mins
Starring: Ed Harris, Marcia Gay Harden, Amy Madigan, Jennifer Connelly, Bud Cort, Val Kilmer, Jeffrey Tambor
Unlike its subject's energetic and vibrant paintings, Pollock is a dark and languorous glimpse into the life of America's greatest Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock. The film marks the directorial debut of Ed Harris who garnered an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Pollock, a role his brooding persona is well suited to and one that required little make-up. Indeed the idea stemmed from an observation Harris's father made that Ed bore an uncanny resemblance to the artist.
Harris's passion and affection for the project is evident in every frame, but his unblinking focus on Pollock's deeply troubled psyche allowed little light to penetrate the film's mournful insularity.
The film deals with the fifteen-year period from 1941, when Pollock partnered with fellow artist Lee Krasner (Marcia Gay Harden), until he killed himself in a drunken haze by slamming his car into a tree in 1956. The intervening years saw his fortunes rise from struggling artist to renowned celebrity, a passage that brought little respite from the depressive episodes that plagued his life, but fuelled his work.
Gay Harden, who also received an Oscar nomination for her role, captures perfectly the impassioned resolve of Krasner, who sacrificed her own artistic ambitions to champion the cause of the man she considered the greatest living painter of his day. Their relationship was based more on need than love. He needed someone to look after him, to keep him from his own self-destructive tendencies and allow him to concentrate on his work. She needed him to add meaning to her life. She felt it was her duty to awaken the world to his talents. Pollock appears a biased title to a film that establishes his success was in equal part due to Krasner's determination as it was to his talent.
The film's most vital scenes are those showing Pollock at work. Harris embodies Pollock's manic intensity as he stalks about the canvas administering paint with cathartic abandon. It was only through painting that he was free of his demons. His drinking, violent outbursts and egocentric personality allowed him few friends. What friends he did have, like his benefactor the esteemed art collector Peggy Guggenheim, played grandly by Harris's wife Amy Madigan, were drawn to him more through admiration than affection.
Spending two hours in the study of one man's life, you would hope to come away with a better understanding of him and his work. My reservations with Pollock, based on the book Jackson Pollock: An American Saga by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, are that by the end I only had a cursory appreciation of what he was like and a feeling that some vital piece of the jigsaw was missing. The film failed to capture the sense of accomplishment Pollock was striving for and achieved with his invention of drip painting. His life appeared in isolation from the rest of the world, resulting in a loss of perspective.
It's clear that Pollock was an inquisitive and gifted artist, whose work invited the viewer to look as much inside themselves as at the canvas. Pollock, however, despite its gallant attempt to reconcile the man with his art, fails to answer the fundamental question of who Jackson Pollock was.
Kevin Murphy
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