* * (out of 4)
In an early scene, Jackson Pollock (Ed Harris) beats a knife and fork maniacally in tune with the buoyant beats of Gene Krupa on the radio. It’s not long before he’s mashing his hands into the food like some spoiled child. His family looks on, aghast. Later, a colleague turned to me and asked, “Who does that? That little drumming thing he does with the silverware?”
The answer, of course, is method actors do this when imitating life. Just like they learned in acting class. Often a fine and intense actor, Harris demonstrates in Pollock everything that is fundamentally wrong with the Actor’s Studio approach to drama. One would blame the director for not asking his star to make the scene less of a moment, but Harris took on that role himself. After all, he’s been living with this project for ten long years. He practically is Pollock. They say pride goeth before the fall, right?
* * *
Pollock may have cracked the art world wide open with his free associative jazz-splatter technique, but Harris keeps his filmmaking approach purely functional. Unlike using the epic visual poetry of Julian Schnabel’s Before Night Falls, Harris is clearly more interested in Pollock the Man over Pollock the Artist. It’s odd to think that Schnabel’s film is the more painterly of the two, considering it’s the story of a sensitive writer.
Harirs’ camera is unobtrusive, meant to highlight the acting. This is the chief mistake he makes. The studio scenes, where Pollock discovers his frenetic approach to painting, are less about visual metaphors for implosive discovery than about Ed Harris, hunched over, brow furrowed, cigarette jutting from his taut lips.
The weight of Harris’ performance is meant to carry us through, but he’s doing nothing Marlon Brando hadn’t uncorked years ago with his brutish, physical interpretation of Stanley Kowalski. This is never more apparant than his scenes opposite Marcia Gay Harden, mangling a Brooklynese accent as Pollock’s long suffering wife, Lee Krasner.
Pollock is the Tortured Artist, an archetype familiar from such films as Basquiat, Lust For Life, Total Eclipse and Surviving Picasso, among others. When he’s not drinking himself into a mad frenzy, smashing furniture and screaming at the top of his lungs, he’s cradled up like a baby in the arms of his Nurturing Woman (Krasner, naturally).
