Posted: 08/22/2001

Pollock

(2001)

by Parama Chaudhury

Drip, drip, drip…and a little family drama.

You would think that a painter’s biography would look pretty much the same on the small screen as on the big one. But this is Jackson Pollock, with his drip paintings, the creation of which itself looks like performance art. And since the scenes with Pollock at work are the best, the most poetic and probably the most well thought-out ones, see it on as large a screen as you can find.

The events portrayed in Pollock are what everyone knows him best for: the meeting with Lee Krasner, Peggy Guggenheim going from benefactor to buddy, exile to the Hamptons and from booze, the feature in Life magazine and the quick trip back from sobriety. The film actually goes a long way towards looking at these events, and Pollock himself, with a balanced, investigative lens. After all, this is America’s answer to Picasso, and a notorious drunk, to boot. The temptation to deify or smear must have been intense. The director, Ed Harris, actually seems a little hesitant to form an opinion about Pollock the man, which is much better than glorifying him. On the other hand, the camera pans his paintings, and him painting, with deference, but not awe, which makes the audience appreciate the process of creating this wonderful new art. Pollock’s paintings are dynamic as it is, but I guarantee you that the next time you’re in the MoMA, you’ll see him dancing in front of your eyes!

The role of Pollock is tailor-made for Ed Harris. He is the creative brute, not boorish, but incapable of any emotional maturity. Harris doesn’t take sides in his acting either. He plays Pollock as an everyman, which makes the otherwise tepid storyline interesting and even heart-warming. Indeed, he succeeds in making Pollock a fascinating piece of Americana: a manly man who could have come out of the middle of rural Kansas, but with the talent and the on-again-off-again ambition to just about make magic. It isn’t the eulogized American Dream, but it probably is much closer to the Way Americans Try To Do Their Thing than Norman Rockwell would like to admit.

The chief presence in Pollock’s life is, of course, his wife, Lee Krasner, played with gusto by Marcia Gay Harden. She does a pretty good job, but Harris’s Pollock comes off just a little too well. Harden’s Brooklyn accent seems a little too put-on next to Harris’s subdued portrayal of an extremely eccentric man. Besides, did Lee Krasner really give up all her connections to art, and become the dedicated-to-driving-her-husband’s-ambition middle-class housewife that we see in the movie? If she did, why? Any telling of Pollock’s life seems incomplete without an explanation. Among the rest of the long line of characters trooping in and out of Pollock’s life, Jeffrey Tambor as the critic, Clem Greenberg, stands out as someone who seems as devoted as Harris, to try and get under the skin of a legend.

Reviewing a biopic is always hard, because you’re never quite sure what “good” is. What do we want from such a movie? The truth? I get that from CNN. The dirt? Same source. Most of us probably look for a little reflection on the artist. Somehow it seems correct to know about an artist’s life in order to understand his work better. This movie succeeds because you can actually feel that it is trying to understand Pollock as the man who created all that blue and red. Sometimes it feels like the director has given up trying to understand why anyone would ever do this, and you get frustrated with the flakiness of the scene. But what counts in the end is whether the film makes a sincere effort to study its celebrated subject, and Pollock succeeds simply because it does. It definitely does.

Parama Chaudhury is a graduate student, an ex-writing instructor and a budding freelance writer, based in New York City.

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