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Pollock

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Movie propaganda

In August of 1949, Life Magazine ran a banner headline that begged the question: "Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" The article pictured Pollock in a now-famous pose, wearing a worn black jacket and blue jeans, his arms crossed defiantly over his chest and one of his kinetic canvasses stretched out behind him.

Already well-known in the New York art world, he had become a household name - the USA's first "art star" - and his bold and radical style of painting continued to change the course of modern art. But the torments that had plagued the artist all of his life - perhaps the ones that drove him to paint in the first place, or that helped script his fiercely original art - continued to haunt him. As he struggled with self-doubt, engaging in a lonely tug-of-war between needing to express himself and wanting to shut the world out, Pollock (Ed Harris) began a downward spiral that would threaten to destroy the foundations of his marriage, the promise of his career, and - on one deceptively calm and balmy summer night in 1956 - his life.

Theatrical propaganda posters

Target demographic movie keyword propaganda

Film biography art artist painter Jackson Pollock torment paint canvas

Persons of interest

Ed Harris .... Jackson Pollock, Director
Robert Knott .... Sande Pollock
Molly Regan .... Arloie Pollock
Marcia Gay Harden .... Lee Krasner
Sada Thompson .... Stella Pollock
Eulala Grace Harden .... Arloie's Baby
Matthew Sussman .... Reuben Kadish
Bud Cort .... Howard Putzel
Amy Madigan .... Peggy Guggenheim
Everett Quinton .... James Johnson Sweeney
Annabelle Gurwitch .... May Rosenberg
John Rothman .... Harold Rosenberg
John Heard .... Tony Smith
Kenny Scharf .... William Baziotes
Tom McGuinness .... Franz Kline
Steven Naifeh .... Author: Jackson Pollock: An American Saga
Gregory White Smith .... Author: Jackson Pollock: An American Saga
Barbara Turner .... Screenwriter
Susan Emshwiller .... Screenwriter

Cinematic intelligence sources

Awards and film festivals:

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS - Oscars) 2002: Nominated: Best actor (Ed Harris), best supporting actress (Marcia Gay Harden)
Cinematic Intelligence Agency Trenchcoat Awards 2003

Pollock official movie site
Studios and distributors:

Sony Pictures Releasing

Intelligence analyst

Agent Provocateur Alexander Feld

Theatrical report

In Ed Harris' directorial debut, painter Jackson Pollock joins subject company he deserves - Michelangelo, Rodin and van Gogh - in this stunning biography. Pollock may be the first cinematic treatment of a great painter to avoid the gush and clichés intended to reveal the mystery process of creative genius. Well, almost.

The motivating factor here is that of actor/director Harris, whose work is a 10-year labour of and devotion. He gained 15 kilos for the part, grew a beard, made a preparatory documentary on Pollock, spent years learning to paint in Pollock's distinct style and studied paintings, letters and locations. He even switched to no-filter Camels.

Pollock knew Tennessee Williams, and he is said to have been one of the inspirations for Stanley Kowalski. Harris, the closest actor of his generation to embody the power and poetry of Brando, brings the same intensity that Brando tore up the screen with during that same era. Whether it is the collapse after a week long bender, slamming a car door, a pathetic screw, a public piss, driven action painting or brutal Streetcar-like clashes with his wife/muse, Harris' swagger is honest and devoid of vanity. His loss of the Oscar to Russel Crowe (for Gladiator!) is silly and sad.

Pollock was one of the most significant artists of the last century. (Spare any philistine comments about his work... you didn't do it; in fact, nobody had or has.) For a few seasons in the late 40s and early 50s, he dribbled, poured and splattered paint into webs of elaborate, convoluted lines, disrupted by splotches, dots and streaks. With this feral but controlled use of regular house paint, Abstract Expressionism was born. Seemingly intangible, these canvases nonetheless mirror an agonised, incomprehensible world, seen by a tortured visionary. In conveying this sense alone, Pollock is a success.

If Jackson Pollock was a monumental artist, he was also a monumental bastard, a human cyclone, a self-centred egotist, pathetically insecure, and a disgusting, violent alcoholic. In portraying Pollock's benders and rages nothing is spared; by actual accounts this is a modified vision. But this in-your-face filmmaking does indeed get at the source behind the paint. In the film's strongest moment, Pollock has been posing for a filmmaker in the fallacious throes of creativity for weeks, finishing, of all times, at the start of Thanksgiving dinner. Realising his revolutionary style is no longer original, he ends a 2-year drought in a raging drunken haze, upturning the feast-laden table. The camera cuts to his most powerful masterpieces, the huge poured abstracts from 1947-50, exhibited together, in reverential silence. It might as well be the Louvre.

The role of the muse here falls to Pollock's long-suffering wife, Lee Krasner, here portrayed by Marcia Gay Harden (a well deserved Oscar in this case) in a performance that rises to Harris' heights at every turn. The chemistry between the two stars, superbly managed by Harris the director, is one of the films strengths. Krasner, a no-nonsense type with a thick Brooklynese, knew genius when she saw it, and instigates the affair and marriage. But she is no doormat Stella Kowalski; as tough as Pollock, she knows exactly what she wants, in this case to be muse to a great painter. In a particularly fine moment, she scathingly lists the reasons why she will not have a child with the imploring Pollock. An exceptional artist in her own right, Krasner only came to fulfilment after Pollock's death, and spent the remainder of her life managing his estate. Harris' highlighting of Krasner's work, often mannered and derivative, is particularly touching; less successful is allowing a cheaply symbolic crow - yes, a crow - to upstage one of his actress' finest monologues.

Two huge art-world figures make vital appearances. Jeffrey Tambor is imposing as the pontificating Clement Greenberg, the most important art critic of the era and a Pollock champion. Amy Madigan (Harris' real-life wife) plays Peggy Guggenheim, the eccentric art collector and curator who, as godmother and muse to a dozen "isms", became the century's foremost art patron. Madigan plays her honestly, loud, ballsy and brilliant, her signature dogs, gowns and mis-matched earrings are in place, but the role as written barely scratches the surface on this complex and remarkable woman, let alone her influence on Pollock.

This is how Pollock first falters. Harris is driven to encapsulate the entire Manhattan art world on screen and, frankly, it doesn't fit. Although giants like Greenberg and Guggenheim fare reasonably well, Willem de Kooning is relegated to two vignettes, albeit by Val Kilmer. A dozen other luminaries saunter on and off, played by first-rate actors. Pollock's huge family also parades in and out, but they remain shadows. One family gathering with his numerous brothers (mothered by the wonderful Sada Thompson) attempts to convey Pollock's insecurity and alienation from his family. When his I'm-Better-Than-Picasso rant is rightly cut off by his sister-in-law, she might as well have been the cleaning lady.

Pollock's other flaw is inevitable; it is virtually impossible to capture the creative process on film. Commissioned at the start of his career by Peggy Guggenheim to paint a giant mural for her entrance foyer, we see him staring, appropriately tortured, for months (read seasonal changes) at the blank canvas. Inspiration comes in a frenzied burst, and he paints the whole shebang in swirls, circles and blobs in one go, one colour layer at a time. This is how Krasner related it for history; in reality, it seems unlikely. Cinematically, especially underscored by oddly consonant, insipid music, it looks absurd, not unlike watching Stravinsky knock off The rite of spring without pausing to sharpen a pencil.

The film's weakest moment comes in a similar context. We are led to believe that Pollock "discovered" the dribbling technique as the result of accidentally spilling paint on the floor of his studio. Of course, inspirational madness ensues. The muse has arrived, the voice found. This is probably a fallacy; Pollock had spent the better part of the 1940s wrestling with Picasso and the legacies of Dada, Surrealism and Cubism. No grand incident (like Mural) heralds Abstract Impressionism, no mammoth effort, no single canvas. Pollock's ensuing masterworks just about overthrew the entire hypothesis of painting as handed down through two millennia of Western cultural history; the presumption that this came about from spilled paint is as credulous as Isaac Newton's apple.

Pollock, on the whole, however, is admirable filmmaking. It does a superb job of evoking pre-war New York, the cinematography conjures up the required moods very well, and the period detail is precise to the point of obsession. The screenplay, although laboured with far too many scenes and characters, covers a good deal of artsy debate without becoming diatribe. And, above all, it does succeed in reminding us that great art and truly great artists are rarely beautiful in a conventional sense, but can honestly express the good, the bad and the ugly about our world and ourselves.

You really should see it.