"I Am Nature"

Pollock
**1/2

Sasha Stone
Mirror film critic 

   Jackson Pollock felt constantly under attack -- by his critics, his family, his demons, anything and everything around him. His explanation to a Life Magazine reporter about his painting was that when you look at a bed of flowers you don't ask what it all means; you simply admire. This is also what is required in viewing the Pollock the person, as well as Pollack the film.
   Director, producer and star Ed Harris doesn't feel like glamorizing Pollock, which is surprising. If there is one painter whom we all project our most belligerent rebel fantasies upon, it is Pollock -- hard drinker, womanizer, who painted like a mad genius but crashed through everything else, until finally crashing his car, killing himself and his passenger. 
   Most great art forgives artists their horrible personalities, yet in "Pollock" we see no real compassion for the man on whom Harris meditated for the fifteen years it took to get the project off the ground. Here is a stark, disturbing look at a very troubled man who is probably a manic-depressive and who, as wife and painter Lee Krasner observed, needs needs needs, and who gives nothing back except for his art. It's as if Harris has made up his mind about Jackson Pollock and has decided that the man had no redeemable traits beyond his extraordinary talent. To this end, Harris' film essentially plays as all one note.
   There are moments of true greatness in "Pollock." Harris is assured behind the camera, delivering some heart-stopping shots, like the opener -- which starts on the image of a program from a gallery being pressed closely to the bountiful breasts of a young female admirer as it makes its way across a crowded gallery floor before meeting two shaking hands with oily paint clogging the fingernails -- the artist signs the program, and then we see his face. At first glance, he's scared, until eyes lock upon someone. Who is he seeing? We don't find out because the film breaks here and travels backward to the beginnings of Jackson Pollock's relationship with Lee Krasner.
   Marcia Gay Harden plays Krasner with such ease you have trouble remembering her in any other part. Her Krasner seems at first oblivious to Pollock's apparent inadequacies -- she loves the work so she loves him. Not only does she love him; she sets her own life aside to help make him a star. It's as if she's propping up a dead man, or dressing a child in a man's suit. She's his champion, his savior, his comfort. What does she get back? Pollock, for better or worse. Once he starts believing he can live without her, we see how fragile and crippled he is. 
   Harris is making a point here -- Pollock would have died without Lee Krasner, as the character himself admits at one point. "I owe her something," he says. We know he owes her, all right. We also know Lee was too smart to expect anything more from Pollock; she knew what and who he was; she also knew that she had gotten much out of their relationship, difficult as it was. 
   As for the film itself, it tips heavily in Lee Krasner's direction, losing much when she's off screen. We don't really care about Jackson Pollock (who really did besides Lee?) because he's such a petulant, self-aggrandizing bore. The film suffers for this, and the end drags on tediously, livened up momentarily by the leggy beauty Jennifer Connelly who plays Pollock's mistress.
   The film is at its best whenever Harris as Pollock is painting. The key to Pollock is that painting saved him from the endless despair to which he was inclined. When Pollock had something to grind against he was at his best. When his critics hated his work, he had something to work for. Once he reached his prime, and women were throwing themselves at him, critics salivating at his work, he had nothing more to live for. Harris handles this beautifully, gaining a fair amount of weight by the film's end and showing an astonishing transformation from young rebel to aging has-been.
   Harris' real-life wife, Amy Madigan, is wonderful as Peggy Guggenheim, a complicated woman in her own right -- when the two inevitably merge we see what it must have been like for Pollock and Guggenheim to live up to expectations.
   Harris looks so much like the Pollock of our collective memory its startling, particularly when we see him from behind -- that bald head, the coat, those ears. When he's bent over painting it's hard to tell the difference. We are right there in Pollock's studio; we can practically smell the paint, and feel the ache he must have had in his back from stooping over.
   Even though this film is Harris' baby, he may have been better off concentrating on one role -- either taking on the challenge of the part, or else presiding as director. There is a sense of both aspects being almost great, but just barely missing. And, truth be told, the painter's relentless awfulness eventually becomes almost stupefying in director Harris' hands. Even still, the film contains arguably the best performances of the year, and does display Harris' directorial promise.
   We don't always want to look at what goes into making beauty -- we don't even like to look at the natural world when it turns ugly and cruel -- but, as Pollock says, he is nature. And there's really no explaining him. There's just the beauty of his work -- which is, surely, enough.