The epidemic of biopix continues with Pollock,
directed by and starring Ed Harris in the title role. An
absurdly dreadful movie about the life of the great American painter Jackson
Pollock, Harris' directorial debut resembles a bad 1950s realistic play--just imagine a William Inge drama about
the life of Hart Crane. God help us all if Harris--whom I like as an actor
otherwise--ever decides to film the life of Jane Bowles! Pollock is based on a book that came out some years
back co-authored by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, a fat tome chock full of
biographical data smothered in a bargain basement Freudian sauce--which does not
bode well from the beginning. Nor do the two screenwriters, Barbara Turner and
Susan J. Emshwiller, manage to
do more than piece together a basic story out of Naifeh and White's detritus.
Just to prove to the audience that this is no
puny "art" film, but an Art film with muscle, Pollock shows its protagonist
drunkenly shouting "F***k Picasso!" in one of its first scenes. The
movie pitches art as
a competitive sport, as if Jackson Pollock were an aspiring young pitcher
trying to break into the major leagues, and figures like Picasso or Arshile
Gorky or Clyfford
Still were rivals he had to defeat in order to reach his goal. Is art after all
just a good, clean, wholesome American pastime in which the best man wins? Maybe not, since
in Pollock the artist in question turns out to resemble the raging Ty Cobb more than
the benign Lou Gehrig.
The movies starts off in the early 1950s, after
the painter has been discovered by Life magazine, when he signs a copy of the
article for a young woman--Ruth Klingman--at a showing of his recent work. The
action then shifts back nine years earlier. At that time, Pollock, still
unknown, was living with his mother, brother, and sister-in-law in a
cramped apartment in New York city. Fed up with his alcohol fueled paranoid
rages, the family decamps to Connecticut, where Pollock's brother has found work
in a defense plant, and more or less abandon Jackson to his own devices.
However, he is soon visited by another painter, Lee Krasner (Marcia Gay Harden), who becomes first
his girlfriend and later wife and keeper, as well as his strongest supporter up
to the time of his death.
An important turning point occurs in Pollock's
life, however, when a friend introduces him to Howard Putzler (Bud Cort) , the secretary and
confidante of Peggy Guggenheim (Amy Madigan), the affluent collector of art and artists, who
opened a gallery and museum in New York in 1942, Art of this Century. In spite
of Pollock's personal eccentricities--such as urinating in the fireplace at one
of her parties--Guggenheim recognizes his talent and agrees to exhibit his
painting at Art of this Century. Nevertheless, Pollock's drinking continues unabated,
and after one horrendous binge, he and Krasner move to an old farm on Long
Island.
Away from the city, Pollock and Krasner lead a
Walden-like existence, and his painting begins to flower, particularly after he
manages to go on the wagon for several years. But recognition comes very
slowly while the two eke out a meager existence in the country, and Pollock's
rise to fame only commences after the Life magazine spread appears. But as his
artistic fortunes wax, his personal life wanes, especially once he returns to
the sauce. Unable to exorcise his private demons, Pollock turns into an abusive
drunken lout who constantly feuds with his wife and seeks solace in the company
of Ruth Klingman (Jennifer Connolly)--the girl whose copy of Life he has autographed in the opening
scene.
Pollock never moves at a very fast pace, but it
becomes unbearably slow in its final half hour or so. The rather glamorous
figure of the first half or so of the film now has turned into a lumbering,
unshaven slob, whose figure suggests that of a drunken bum more than that
of one of the most famous artists in the country. Pollock's life has nowhere to
go but down, and the film follows the descending arc of his last days with a
morbid fascination, until the moment when he takes his ultimate fatal drive,
completely inebriated, and kills himself and Ruth's friend Edith Metzger (Sally
Murphy), who has unfortunately
decided to come along for the weekend.
Although Ed Harris bears a certain resemblance
to the rangy Pollock, I found his interpretation of the role stiff and
unconvincing. Among the other performers, I enjoyed Bud Cort as Howard Putzler
and Jeffrey Tambor as Clement Greenberg. But Val Kilmer looks like an overfed
tomcat as Willem De Kooning, and Amy Madigan struck me as silly playing Peggy
Guggenheim, whom the movie depicts as a man eater inhabiting the higher realms
of the art world. Of all the cast, only Marcia Gay
Harden stands out as Lee Krasner, in a performance for which she rightly
received an Oscar®.
It
is astonishing that a movie about a painter and his work should be so
visually inert. Pollock is competently photographed by Lisa Rinzler, but it might as well
be a motion picture about a garage mechanic. Not for a moment does the
film--although it shows many of Pollock's paintings and includes scenes of him
at work--ever attempt to visually engage in a dialogue with Pollock's work as
does Robert Altman, who radically thematises color and gesture in every shot of Vincent
and Theo. Unlike Vincente Minnelli, who in Lust for Life aped Van Gogh's style
as if he were making an MGM musical, Altman's allusions to Van Gogh's paintings
produce a counterpoint between the paintings and Van Gogh's immediate visual
environment that begins with the first frame and continues to the last.
This ongoing exchange of images reaches an almost
unbearable point of intensity when Van Gogh commits suicide. Altman photographs
the scene from a considerable distance, not cutting in as the painter deserts
his canvas and goes off to shoot himself in the field behind him. The blank
canvas remains in the foreground the whole time, a white rectangle like a gash
in the film or a blind eye regarding the audience. Only after the fatally
injured Van Gogh staggers back, does Altman cut to show him staining the canvas red, involuntarily
creating his last work with his own blood. It takes an
almost heroic restraint not to exploit such an emotionally charged scene for all
it is worth, but by doing so Altman succeeds in condensing a painter's entire
artistic life into a few minutes of screen time.
Where Before Night Falls remorselessly
demythologizes the image of the artist as hero/sacrificial victim, Pollock goes in the absolutely
opposite direction, back to the contemptible bourgeois conception of the great
artist as divinely inspired madman and martyr to the cause of art, whose inspirations come totally out of the
blue like an epileptic seizure. One especially painful episode of this
kind--which recalls the ludicrous scene in Michael Curtiz' Night and Day in which Cole Porter (Cary Grant)
gets the inspiration for the song "Night and Day" while listening to a
ticking clock--occurs when Pollock gets the idea for drip painting after he
accidentally drips paint on the floor. Thus is great art born!
Nor does Pollock ever make any attempt, however
misguided, at elucidating the "Pollock mystery." Instead, the movie
violently pulls all of its material out of context and throws it at the audience
like so many lumps of regurgitated food. Assorted prominent figures from
the New York art scene of the 1940s and 1950s--among them Willem De Kooning,
Helen Frankenthaler (Stephanie Seymour), and Tony Smith (John Heard)--litter the scenery, but the movie supplies
hardly a clue as to who they might be. Clement Greenberg, the first serious
critic of Pollock's work, regularly shows up as a visitor in the later scenes of
the movie, but only someone who had studied the history of American art in the
20th century would have the least idea of his significance in Pollock's career.
Perhaps Sony Pictures Classics should consider sending out a pocket guide for
prospective viewers to theaters screening Pollock.
But resurrecting the myth of the great artist as
great loony is by no means the least of Pollock's sins. Anyone who makes a
motion picture about a figure like Jackson Pollock has to deal with two basic problems
which the creators of Pollock catastrophically choose to ignore. The first of
these problems is that of making Pollock's innovations comprehensible to a movie
audience without becoming condescending or overly technical. But although
Pollock throws out terms like Cubism and Surrealism, it makes no effort to show
how Pollock's painting was a specific artistic response to both the
possibilities and the problems opened up by the work of a Picasso or a Kandinsky--to
cite two of the names that the movie conspicuously drops.
One
possible solution to this problem would be to point out that works of art employ
a formal language--always a risky ploy, since it quickly passes over into the
debatable identification of art and language. In this case, making such a point
might explain the anger aroused by radically innovative paintings like
Pollock's, a response so reminiscent of that of ethnocentric tourists who blow a
fuse when they visit foreign countries and discover that everyone does not speak
their native language. But Pollock, which presents works of art as the distillate
of an irrational act of inspiration--an anti-artistic thesis that goes back to
Plato--forecloses this possibility from the beginning.
An even more basic question is whether it is at
all possible to meaningfully portray the life of an artist in a motion picture.
Pollock does not even address itself to this question, but Vincent and
Theo,
once more, does point in one possible direction by refusing to degrade works of
art to props. The movie refuses to present Van Gogh's paintings as the immediate
manifestation of his troubled life, as if the latter were the cause and the
former the effect. His creations could just as easily have been the work of a painter
living a life of quiet seclusion in Neuilly-sur-Seine, and who would be so rash
today as to imagine that any spaced-out transient trying to sell paintings on a
street corner is a new Van Gogh in disguise?
Instead,
Vincent and Theo employs what might be called a double causality--to borrow a
phrase used by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze in his book The Logic of
Sense. On the
one hand, there is the story of the miserably unhappy, tortured artist--who
unlike the one in Lust for Life does not come equipped with a ready-made
halo--and ends by taking his own life. On the other, there is a whole series of
paintings that have a story of their own to tell, quite independently of the
life story of Vincent Van Gogh. Not that the two have nothing in common! But it is only
by respecting that double causality in the first place that it might become
possible to analyze the relation between the two series, that of the contingent
sequence of events composing Van Gogh's life, on the one hand, and the far from
contingent sequence of visual gestures that links one painting to another, on the
other.
The
Adamic current in American life--with all that it implies of the march towards
perfection and a happy ending to history--has often been noted by cultural
historians. But in the case of an artist like Pollock-- who has important
predecessors in this respect in Herman
Melville, Ezra Pound, Charles Ives, and William Faulkner--it
might be far more relevant to invoke the figure of Prometheus, with all that it
in turn implies of tragic culpability. What all these artists attempted to a
greater or lesser degree in their work was not to begin in the morning of
creation like the pious Puritan sons of Adam, but to reduce everything to chaos
and fashion a new world from the fragments by an act of creative will--a far more blasphemous and fateful gesture than
merely returning to Eden, even in the secularized guise of nature.
After all, once the
artist had reduced everything to primal disorder, what guarantee was there of
ever being able to achieve that new act of creation? An intrinsic paradox
underlies Pollock's greatest paintings. As Sam Hunter states in his
insightful commentary on Pollock's later work in American Art of the 20th
Century, "any intelligible, identifiable feeling-content reveals itself
fitfully in the midst of a nameless chaos..." But is it possible to agree
with Hunter when he goes on to assert that "It was one of Pollock's signal
achievements to give such magnitude and impressiveness to the act of painting as
to make us think of the mysteries of natural creation, of that 'first division
of chaos' at the origin of our world"?
Was
it truly the "'first division of chaos'" at which Pollock arrived? Or
not much more the fatally pregnant moment before creation starts? Does not the power of
the monumental drip paintings like Lavender Mist derive from an
unmediated--and ultimately irreconcilable--tension between the vertiginous sense
of chaotic visual flux and the way the canvas freezes that flux just before it
will possibly resolve itself into some definite form? It is not the moment of
creation that dominates these paintings, but the moment of tragic decision,
Stéphane Mallarmé's casting of the dice. And if the finished painting was itself that
moment frozen in time, how could it ever be more than the stele of a battle that
was doomed to be lost in advance? What painting could itself ever live up to the
artist's vision of the "act of painting"?
In a remarkable
passage in his novel Pierre, Melville provided a remarkable augury of the
high stakes of such an agon when he described how his American would-be author
and belle âme sees himself transformed into the Giant Enceladus in a
nightmare vision: "Pierre saw Enceladus no more; but on the Titan's armless
trunk, his own duplicate face and features magnifiedly gleamed upon him with
prophetic discomfiture and woe." Yet was it really Enceladus--who was not a
Titan--that Melville had in mind? Was it not rather the Titan who was mythic
giver of fire to the human race? And was not that "prophetic discomfiture and
woe" a far more accurate forecast of the future of the artist in the United
States than the Adamic rhapsodies of Emerson and Whitman?
Jackson
Pollock called down the wrath of Zeus on his own head as surely as did
Prometheus. If he did not end up chained to a rock having his liver eaten out by
a vulture, alcoholism served as an effective substitute. At the end of Oedipus
Rex,
the Thebans turn away from the dishonored king in horror--the fitting destiny of
a tragic hero. By depriving its hero of that destiny, by dragging him down to
the level of a pitiable psychiatric case, Pollock inflicts upon him a far more
humiliating punishment than any tragic hero ever suffered.
Production
data courtesy of The Internet Movie Database
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