Artistic Differences

I have never cared one bit for modern artist Jackson Pollock. (A sample of the style he is best known for is displayed there at the right, which you can click to enlarge if you choose.) But I am a fan of Ed Harris, both as an actor and a director. Having liked his only other directorial effort, Appaloosa, I decided to try his earlier film, Pollock, despite my dislike of the subject matter.

I would never have thought it possible, but seeing the movie made me like Jackson Pollock even less. The movie wants to paint the picture (pun not intended) of the man as some sort of tortured genius, but convinced me no more of his genius than I (dis)believed before, and seemed to show that most of the torture was of his own making.

Jackson Pollock did struggle somewhat to get going, but it's not like he was unappreciated in his time. He hit it big and enjoyed many years both wealthy and famous. He didn't have to fight in World War II. He met and married a woman who completely supported him in all his artistic efforts, and was a painter herself and could understand and appreciate the man's work.

And, of course, he became famous when he decided to start hanging his drop cloths on the wall. (A discovery which the film doesn't really praise for being any more than the accident it surely was.) So while he was poor for a few years -- at a time when many people were -- he lived a relatively charmed life.

But he was still a morose and unhappy drunkard who whined about being unappreciated, bemoaned having any other artists other than himself held in any critical esteem, and was a generally unlikeable fellow.

So, on the one hand, I suppose you can praise Ed Harris the director for leading Ed Harris the actor in a warts-and-all performance that doesn't really make the character very sympathetic. But it doesn't make it understandable either, and there is the first of many faults I lay with the script.

The script really just made me ask, what's the point? If you're interesting in art history, you could read a biography of Jackson Pollock. I didn't find this story to present anything worthy of dramatizing it. Really, it doesn't actually dramatize it at all. It's a rather dry biography of events over a 15 year period of the man's life, and doesn't seem to take any point of view on it at all that I could discern. It was just a narrator and a few inserted still photographs shy of being a documentary; it was certainly as dry as a bad one.

Along with Ed Harris' emotional performance, Marcia Gay Harden does strong work as Pollock's wife. Several other recognizable actors pop up for very minor roles, including Jennifer Connelly, Val Kilmer, Amy Madigan, and Jeffrey Tambor. But while I believe from the intensity of their performances (and often, the volume of their yelling) that they are really feeling something, they didn't make me feel anything but boredom. Again, that awful dry script just wasn't giving them anything to work with.

I find it peculiar that Ed Harris chose this of all things to be his directorial debut. And I wonder if that had anything to do with the eight years that passed before he'd direct another film. This was just a text book case of many talented people working tirelessly to try and squeeze blood from a stone. I rate it a D-.