Pollock
dir. Ed Harris
Sony Pictures Classic

While a lot of folks have ripped Castaway for blatantly pandering for Yet Another Tom Hanks Oscar, few have criticized actor Ed Harris' directorial debut Pollock, in which he also stars as abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock, for doing the same thing. Maybe that's because there's a bit more to the movie than a harrowing plane crash and a sporting-equipment Snuffleupagus.

Pollock unsympathetically follows the artist from his near-anonymity when he and wife Lee Krasner (Marcia Gay Harden) first meet, through the height of his artistic powers, all the way to his has-been, alcohol-filled final days.

It's the sort of bell-curve narrative that's become all too common in Hollywood biopics. Nonetheless, Pollock holds together extremely well, namely due to strong performances by its two stars that captured both of them Academy Award nominations (Harris for Best Actor and Harden for Best Supporting Actress).

Throughout the film, Harris seems to channel the enigmatic Pollock, a feeling that the actor's uncanny physical resemblance to the painter does little to dispel. Scenes of Harris working, stooped over a canvas that lies on the floor are feats of athleticism as physically compelling as Mikhail Baryshnikov's dancing or Allen Iverson's drive to the basket. Though the film's speculation that Pollock's technique was born of accident is somewhat bold and ridiculous, it's no less fascinating to watch Harris-as-Pollock, drizzling and splashing paint from brushes that never touch the canvas.

Later, when filmmaker Hans Namuth (Norbert Weisser) visits Pollock and Krasner's Long Island home to shoot his famed documentary of the artist, Harris' re-creation of the event is spellbinding. Pollock's scenes of the artist painting — shot by Namuth from underneath the glass "canvas" — is a work of art in its own right.

But with the exception of a few of Harris' solo scenes, Harden carries this movie. As Pollock's lover, muse, peer, promoter and codependent, Harden is Pollock's emotional core. When Pollock goes off the deep end and flips over a dining room table, Harris' audience feels worse for Krasner, who it knows will be the one to take care of this mess and put poor Jackson to bed.

Harris and Harden's skilled portrayals illuminate the paradox of Krasner's dual role as feminist and codependent. On the one hand, Harden's character seems weak for putting aside her own art to promote her husband's, as well as for not divorcing him when things really deteriorated. But when Krasner yells her litany of reasons for not wanting children (namely, Pollock's drinking), you wish more oppressed wives followed her example.

It's all the more painful, then, when Harris appears as the overweight, unshaven abusive husband of 1,000 TV movies because we know Krasner has had to weather this transition. Having given up painting and succumbed entirely to drinking and surliness, Pollock may likely have foreseen his untimely death, and Harris smoothly adds a clairvoyant, rocky turmoil to his subject's final days.

When Krasner takes a trip to Europe near the end of the film, leaving Pollock alone with his lover Ruth Kligman (Jennifer Connelly, whose character is introduced briefly in the film's opening scene, only to disappear for more than an hour), the movie might as well be over. Connelly, who proved herself in Requiem for a Dream, takes a step backward, standing there while Harris acts around her.

And she doesn't get much help from Barbara Turner and Susan Emshwiller's great-up-to-this-point script, either. Aside from the tired pretty-young-thing/aging-famous-guy dynamic, the audience is left to guess at exactly what it was that fueled Pollock and Kligman's romance, or how Kligman handled Pollock's drinking. The whole Pollock's-final-days portion of the movie seems poorly edited and tacked on, rightly feeling as if the film's emotional foundation (Harden) has been ripped out from underneath.

Which is a shame because Harris put his heart and soul into this film, relentlessly studying Pollock's technique and getting permission to do location shooting at the exterior of Pollock and Krasner's Long Island home, which is now a museum dedicated to the couple. For the majority of the film, Harris' love and attention to detail come through and he's clearly deserving of the Academy Award for which he's been nominated. (Besides, Russell Crowe?)

As for Harden, the selection of the Best Supporting Actress rather than Best Actress category is puzzling. Pollock really begins when Krasner first enters Pollock's Greenwich Village apartment and the camera, along with Krasner, sees Pollock's work for the first time. And it might as well end when Krasner exits the picture on her flight to Europe.

As for the non-acting portions of the movie, Pollock features a well-chosen soundtrack of World War II-era big band and jazz music, though the film's orchestral score is silly, not very well done and at times too frivolous. The film's locations, whether Pollock and Krasner's Greenwich Village digs or Peggy Gugenheim's celebrated Art of This Century gallery, have obviously been carefully chosen and Harris' masterful mise en scene is terrific for a first-time director.

Yet it's clear from the muddled ending that Harris needs to spend a little time in the editing room and work on finishing what he starts. This doesn't mean Pollock isn't one of the most remarkable artist biographies set to film; it just generates a bit of frustration created in knowing someone has fallen just short of a masterwork.

— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)