In “Pollock,” Ed Harris gives a great performance as the alcoholic superstar painter Jackson Pollock, who was the king of the New York City abstract expressionists in the late 1940s and then became world-famous after his car-crash death in 1956. It’s a fiercely concentrated work, totally committed, somberly truthful. Harris, who also directed and co-produced “Pollock,” inhabits this complex role with a fullness and passion few U.S. actors have shown recently, convincing us that Pollock is not only a painter of genius but also a flawed man under whose quiet exterior surge doubts, flames and furies.
Harris understands Pollock — a many-sided, self-destructive, mercurial man — so well that he just seems to be Pollock, a remarkable achievement and worthy of the Oscar nomination he received this week for best actor. Impersonating great painters is a challenge intense movie actors love to try: Charles Laughton played Rembrandt, Anthony Hopkins played Picasso and Kirk Douglas, Jacques Dutronc, Tim Roth and Martin Scorsese have all played Van Gogh. But impersonating Jackson Pollock is different. Along with Picasso, he’s the only one of these artists we’ve been able to see in the flesh on film and even observe in the act of painting.
Harris’ Pollock looks like the guy who could have made these pictures: full of machismo but also strangely delicate and vulnerable. He paints Pollock as a surly narcissistic rebel, kin to those other self-destructive ’50s icons: Jack Kerouac in literature, James Dean in movies, Elvis Presley in pop music.
In his most celebrated works, the splatter or drip paintings, Pollock used his brush to hurl, drip or fling paint against the canvas in sprays and explosions of color — and the results were huge abstract panoramas, interweaving colors and shapes with a panache the postwar cognoscenti called revolutionary and the squares dismissed as glorified wallpaper. Painting on screen himself, Harris suggests the method in Pollock’s seeming madness, his control over apparent accidents. As we watch him prowling though Pollock’s actual East Hampton studio, brooding over the canvases spread on the floor, shaking and flicking his paint-drenched brush in graceful whirling arabesques, the actor fashions an amazing counterfeit of Pollock’s artistry.
The painting scenes are the exalted moments of “Pollock.” The sordid comedy and tragedy lies in what surrounds them: Pollock’s volatile marriage with fellow painter Lee Krasner (Marcia Gay Harden, who was nominated for best supporting actress), the whole pop postwar Bohemian lifestyle to which the alcoholic Pollock was dangerously prone.
Harris’ Pollock is an artist who courts celebrity, wins it beyond his wildest dreams — and then is destroyed by it. He shows us the brooding young Wyoming emigrant arriving in New York, battering his way into the New York art scene, winning the partisanship first of Krasner and then domineering art patroness and gallery owner Peggy Guggenheim (Harris’ wife Amy Madigan), her fey talent scout Howard Putzel (Bud Cort) and the pompous, kingmaking art critic Clement Greenberg (a cuttingly obnoxious job by Jeffrey Tambor). Jennifer Connelly, looking lean and lush, plays art student/lover Ruth Kligman, who survived the car crash that ended Pollock’s bad, bloated, artistically fallow last days.
All of the them are effective, but only Harden can match Harris’ intensity. Nurturing Pollock’s painting while he was alive and his legend and market value after his death, her Krasner radiates good sense and earthy pragmatism.
The film, written by Barbara (“Georgia”) Turner, suggests that Pollock’s strengths and weaknesses were inextricable. The childlishness that led him to drink and excess, was part of the gift that let him break boundaries, blaze trails. But it also suggests that his macho image and unruly appetites destroyed the source of his success: his fertile if combative relationship with Krasner.
Harris and Harden have real on-screen sympatico, in their nasty battles and good times alike. When they’re on Long Island, cinematographer Lisa Rinzler (“Three Seasons”) shoots the scenes in flat, misty tones that almost suggest they’ve stepped into a painting. And when they first have sex, it’s wonderfully raw and romantic: two silhouettes clutching in the darkness of his bare apartment.
But Krasner’s goodness here is not as fascinating to watch as the spectacle of the complex, divided, screwed-up, brilliant Pollock. As a filmmaker, Harris has a style that’s the opposite of Pollock’s: quiet, subtle, realistic. But he bonds with his subject here. Perhaps it’s because, like Pollock, this always fine actor knows how to use accidents and preserve the spontaneous, while never losing sight of his overall design. When he flings paint, it reveals a soul.
`POLLOCK’
(star)(star)(star) 1/2
Directed by Ed Harris; written by Barbara turner, Susan Emshwiller, based on the biography “Jackson Pollock: An American Saga” by Steven Naifeh, Gregory White Smith; photographed by Lisa Rinzler; edited by Kathryn Himoff; production designed by Mark Friedenburg; music by Jeff Beal; produced by Fred Berner, Harris, Jon Kilik. A Sony Pictures Classics release; opens Friday. Running time: 2:03. MPAA rating: R (language and brief sexuality).
THE CAST
Jackson Pollock …………… Ed Harris
Lee Krasner ………………. Marcia Gay Harden
Peggy Guggenheim ………….. Amy Madigan
Ruth Kligman ……………… Jennifer Connelly
Clement Greenberg …………. Jeffrey Tambor
Howard Putzel …………….. Bud Cort
Tony Smith ……………….. John Heard
Willem DeKooning ………….. Val Kilmer
