by Ed Harris, 2001.
Starring: Jennifer Connelly, Marcia Gay Harden, Ed Harris, John Heard, Val Kilmer, Amy Madigan, and Jeffrey Tambor.
Rating: 6.5/10, 9/10.
It’s pretty easy to argue that Pollock isn’t a particularly good film. The direction might seem pretty inept—it’s pretty jerky, with little attention to the visual medium, little interest in having us look at interesting or beautiful images. The storyline, too, is very jerky—one scene doesn’t particularly lead into another, there are great big confusing gaps, and so forth.
That said, I believe that Pollock is a good film—a great one, in fact. For one thing, just as a character portrait it is amazing. I didn’t know Jackson Pollock, of course, but after seeing Ed Harris playing him I feel like I did. Watching him paint is an experience in itself. In most movies where people are painting, I get a little exasperated watching them go dab dab brush, dab dab brush, over and over. Here I really felt that I was watching passionate creation in action.
And Harris’s isn’t the only brilliant performance in the film. We can’t forget the incredible Marcia Gay Harden, as Pollock’s wife, Lee Krasner. While it is still something of a mystery why she stuck with him to the end, her portrayal of a woman who married a man’s talent and ended up with the man himself is emotionally perfect, never faltering for a second.
As for the "problems" I brought up right away, well, I don’t think they’re really problems at all. The structure of the film imitates perfectly the structure of Pollock’s mind—and not in a silly, his brain falls apart so the entire movie will fall apart kind of way, but in more of a these jerks in the direction and storyline will subtly remind you of the jerks in his brain way. And as for the film not showing us interesting images, well, I feel like interesting images in the outside world weren’t the most important of things to the man himself. And besides, aren’t all of the paintings we get to see interesting enough?