Pollock

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  February 24, 2009

  hobster1

  Curiously uninvolving biography of the revolutionary American painter. Does not delve deeply enough into the man. Instead we get standard snapshots of the life of a troubled artist. He is difficult, demanding, and alcoholic, everything we expect an artist to be. Marcia Gay Ha...( read more)rden, however, is memorable as Lee Krasner, Pollock's wife and influential painter in her own right. Her character gives the movie much needed structure and dramatic heft.

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  January 16, 2009

  her69eyes

  "Pollock" tells the true story of Jackson Pollock, the abstract expressionist painter who dominated the New York art scene post World War II. If the name isn't familiar - the technique in which Pollock painted will certainly refresh your memory. By dripping and splashing his pain...( read more)t onto the canvas, Pollock created immense pictures of what is little more than a series of lines and squiggles. To those outside the art community, you might say that his paintings are what inspired the vague critique of many modern artists: "Anyone could do that". Pollock, regardless, was a visionary - a man who found a complete spiritual release through the activity of painting, and through his innovation became one of the most significant artists of the 20th century. The film, directed, co-produced, and starring Ed Harris, isn't so much a celebration of Pollock's work, but rather a biographical study of Pollock the man. However, although elevated by good performances and direction, "Pollock" isn't ultimately too insightful.
  
  There are scenes in the film, before "Pollock" had found the style that made him famous, where brilliant lighting casts a shadow of Ed Harris onto the sprawling canvas before him. This assures us that the artwork of this picture is Jackson Pollock the man. It also delves into what made these paintings so powerful - what they represented, and the process in which they were created, moreso than the artwork itself. Although beautiful, the real artwork of a Pollock painting is all in how it was done. Ed Harris puts an emphasis on this through beautifully shot scenes of Pollock painting, rather than long critical studies of the form of his work. Painting, to Pollock, was a release, and thus a film about Jackson Pollock should be about the process in which he painted rather than his body of work as a painter.
  
  The film "Pollock" tells the story of the self-destructive Jackson Pollock (Ed Harris) in a rather conventional matter. We meet him early in his career, a lost soul living in a tiny apartment. The bath is just feet away from the kitchen table. His paintings, in the beginning of the film, are abstract pieces that don't yet represent what he would later become famous for. Early in the film, Pollock meets Lee Krasner (Marcia Gay Harden, who won an Oscar for her performance), who would become his wife of 15 years. A fellow painter herself, she sees his potential and eventually brings him to the attention of Peggy Guggenheim (Amy Madigan), an eccentric millionaire art patron. It's when he is asked to paint a mural for Peggy's house that he develops the famous splatter technique, which are beautifully shot in the film. It's easy to forget that you're watching a professional actor, not a professional painter, playing the part of Pollock as Harris puts paint on the canvas confidently with great fluidity.
  
  But, like every biopic, we know that you can't tell the tale about the rise of an artist without the subsequent fall. Although gaining great success, Pollock was a recluse. Living in a secluded country house with his wife, and completing his works in a nearby barn, Pollock had the similar tragic and lonely life of many of history's great artists. He was a drunkard who only found a release in the act of painting. Eventually, his career would be cut short in a drunk driving accident in which he took the life of an innocent girl.
  
  There is a whole lot to like about the film. The performances are vibrant and memorable, and Harris' direction is refined enough to not be overbearing. And as this is perhaps his best work as a director, it is also one of (if not the) best performance of Ed Harris' career. I'd mostly put my criticism on the script. We know from watching the film that Pollock is a tortured artist who makes life hell for all those around him, yet we don't really know why he is that way. While there is a certain mystique about Pollock the man, we're kept an arm's distance from everyone in the film and therefore simply observe rather than involve ourselves in the story. For what is told as a conventional melodrama, the audience was too withheld from the inner psyche of the characters to really relate and sympathize. I liked this film quite a bit, but I would have liked it to expand on Pollock and his wife much further.

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  August 20, 2008

  FangsFirst

  In reviewing any biopic, it's easy to get mired in "This didn't really happen this way..." or even "This is so true to life, because..." but both are similar wastes of time, in their way. An entire life can't be condensed satisfactorily into two, three, or even four (or more!) ho...( read more)urs. Far too many events occur which may shape the perceptions of the person being dramatized without being interesting from the outside. The entire set of complexities that make up any personality are simply too much for a single film. As such, I take reviewing any such film as having only a handful of goals: First and foremost is entertainment. I'm not saying I have to be tossing popcorn into my mouth excitedly (considering my taste for popcorn amounts to grudging at best anyway), but it has to be engaging and interesting. Second, it has to maintain a spirit of at least someone's regard, understanding, or feelings about the subject. Third, it has to maintain an air of believability. Showing the events of someone's life in the 1940's in Europe and pretending World War II was not happening, for instance, would be distracting in its inaccuracy for just about any living soul. There are some theoretical hypocrisies here--my (very well) known distaste for poor translation and adaptation of written or drawn works would seem contradictory--but in fact this is a life, a collection of multiple years condensed, re-arranged to make for a much shorter viewing experience. An adaptation takes pre-dramatized events and feels some bizarre need to re-dramatize them sometimes. Certainly, an eye for condensing is appropriate in some cases, naturally, when the original medium temporally exceeds the film form in the same sense as a life (though in a much smaller ratio). Thus, I approach Pollock as a fictional experience with that spark of truth that tells me I knew that something of this happened--and perhaps drives me to find and explore those differences.
  
  Probably the most widely known abstract expressionist painter (in the sense of the public at large, at least based on my own personal experiences), Jackson Pollock (producer/director Ed Harris) is a struggling alcoholic artist, slumming it in the apartment his brother and sister-in-law share with him--our first glimpse of his nature a drunken stumble upstairs to said apartment, screaming "Fuck Picasso!" which sets the stage for the nature of the character the film focuses on. Pollock meets Lee Krasner (Marcia Gay Harden), a fellow abstract expressionist who loves his work. He likes hers as well, and they begin a relationship, Krasner encouraging Pollock and endorsing him publicly, trying to use the connections she has made to gain him the recognition she feels he deserves. He consistently fails in his relationships with family, friends and lover--later wife--Krasner. When his brother Sande's (Robert Knott) wife acidly announces that she and Sande will be leaving the apartment to Jackson, he lashes out in a half-restrained show of anger--a wild display of Gene Krupa imitation to the radio he turns to ear-shattering volume, shouting his love for the music (not, based on earlier dialogue, a lie), but bashing utensils and fists into the table as his anger overcomes his strange attempt to channel it. He battles against a lack of awareness with friends (associates? acquaintances?) like art critic Clement Greenberg (Jeffrey Tambor, in a role like he tended toward pre-Arrested Development, arrogant and blunt to the point of tactless, but seemingly coming from an area that proves its legitimacy), architect Tony Smith (John Heard), and fellow (famous) painter Willem de Kooning (Val Kilmer). When Life magazine breaks him through into the public consciousness, he begins to struggle with fame, ego and their effects on his relationships.
  
  It's inevitable in any discussion of Pollock (I think, anyway) that the issue of the artistic nature (or importance, quality, relevance, etc) of his work comes up. As is usual with my opinions on such things, it falls somewhere between the extremes. I do not mean to say that I think of his work as mediocre or unspecial (but not bad), rather that I think an insufferable pretension tends to surround his appreciators and an arrogant cynicism surrounds his detractors. Many try to imbue meaning into his work, speaking in broad, multisyllabic terms to inflate their own self-importance--rather than even the importance of Pollock's actual work. Both groups tend to work more for their own egos than examination of the work at hand, which is probably what I find so disgusting about the argument. I'll freely admit that for much of my life I fell into the group I've termed detractors--what worth, talent or interest could their be in this seemingly random splatter of paint? In aging a mere handful of years, I've taken on a different approach to this, as with most things. While I reluctantly make divides of "fluff" and "art" insofar as most mediums, I'm never completely comfortable, because those terms often carry qualifying connotations that suggest the latter is inferior in intelligence, skill or talent involved. I don't think this is the case, and when it comes to artists, insofar as those who put paint (or charcoal, etc) to canvas to express themselves (as opposed to recreating, say, images of their favourite characters from science fiction). I would not like to draw lines between "decorative art" and "true art," or whatever false dichotomy one would like to develop. As such, I do have respect for Pollock's work. Not as the ultimate expression of the futility of nature, or as repressed anger unleashed, or whatever nonsense some critics throw at it, or as "it looks purty" as the more banal would say positively, but as something with a clear aesthetic, an originality, and a very visceral response--I find his paintings very engaging.
  
  While most of my response comes to this kind by way of the paintings themselves, some of it also comes from the performance Harris gives us. I can never know Jackson Pollock, none of us can (I'm assuming, of course, that his former friends are not reading my wee little reviews), so this, however inaccurate, misrepresentative, romanticized, overblown and so on it is, it is still the only fully humanized representation we have (his actions are described through an entire human's movements, instead of through the words of a human). It's not a glorious one, not a particularly kind one. Some are turned off to the man and his work completely by viewing this, seeing him as a belligerent, abusive alcoholic jerk. It reminds me, then, of the day I informed my mother that Isaac Asimov's autobiography had managed to elevate him to something resembling "hero" status with me. I can't say as I really have "heroes" as such, but that's the closest thing to it--an endless fascination with someone's life and work that draws me in with its own events in addition to the art resulting from them. She said, "Oh but he probably cheated on his wife or something," and of course, I responded that yes, he did--it's in his autobiography. He says it with shame, but honesty. One can read endless iterations of meaning, both underhanded and honourable into that: a selfish confession, a mock-up of honesty that is only façade and lacks truth, etc. But it's something I learned long ago to take with any person, including myself. Escaping moral flaws is nigh on to impossible in anyone. Even if cheating is antithetical, something else will occur, in some fashion. And so instead I saw what I think Ed Harris wanted to show with this picture he was driven to make. Jackson Pollock was a highly imperfect man, a failure in social situations, often by is own hand, as well as his alcoholism. But what he was first and foremost--as shown in a scene where he drunkenly responds to Clem Greenberg's haughty criticism--is an artist. Lee sees this and this is what draws her to him. She puts up with his anger, drinking and verbal abuse because she loves him as an artist. He finds purity in the act of creation, becomes something and someone else, the closest to perfection that can be seen, the spikes and peaks of the line graph of his life. This is where his purity, his integrity and his absolute honesty and morality lie. Indeed, it is the loss of this that most tortures him--the lack of recognition for his work, the realization of the hurt it causes his family despite the incessant, incurable drive to do it. It's fascinating and as admirable as an inevitably flawed human being can be as an artist, because in this his goodness is absolute. It does not exclude, excuse, deny, or justify his flaws, nor even necessarily outweigh them, but becomes almost a secondary identity or reality, one that is easily respected and admired, despite the muck it wallows in normally.

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  July 15, 2008

  clooneyfan

  This movie was based on the life of abstract painter Jackson Pollock who was an alcoholic and unfaithful to his wife.
  If you are interested biopics of artists you might also want to check out the movie 'Frida' which profiles artist Frida Kahlo

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  November 19, 2007

  mistershinobi

  What a freakinly GREAT movie. I love Pollock's paintings, I love Ed Harris, I love Jennifer Connelly... is this the movie for me? Hell yeah! Top of the top when talking about performances.

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  October 30, 2009

  anastasia57001

  Stellar direction and painstaking attention to detail by Ed Harris whose passion, focus and stamina is amazing. It's been a marathon to complete this film, you can tell. One of the most memorable portraits of an artist you'll ever come across.

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  October 5, 2009

  vsliatsos

  great acting, but such an interesting story deserved sth better in terms of directing and screenplay (-1)

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  August 16, 2009

  MisterTuttle

  Ed Harris does a duel job of acting as Pollock and directing. I was impressed. This isn't much more than a portrait of Pollock who was a great painter until his addiction to alcohol lead him down a dark road, literally.

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  July 17, 2009

  tsigur

  Great bio-film with an amazing performance from Ed Harris. I have always been a fan of his work, which is why I sought out this movie. Jackson Pollock was also always interesting to me and I like his artwork. The best part to me was watching the actual painting process and to thi...( read more)nk that Harris took the time to mimic the style of how he was painting these canvases was impressive. I also liked the way the film was shot and thought the rest of the cast was filled out nicely, but the movie belongs to Harris.

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  July 14, 2009

  Phonex

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_Pollock
  
  
  
  Subject is interesting, but film is so and so. E.H needs more time to make a film maybe.

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View more Pollock reviews at RottenTomatoes.com

• 
  February 19, 2007

  jk2060

  Who is a true artist? How could you define a great artist? Is understanding art also an art? Mental sickness and art... the gifted troubled ones that leave us awe struck by means of their art. These are some of the many issues in this film. And it doesn't fail to do justice to the reality of being an artist.
  This movie is about a genius, Jackson Pollock, who like any genius has a dark side, an Achilles' heel, which is a mental sickness worsened by a drinking problem. It's also an accurate portrayal of the feelings of someone who fell in love with the man behind the artwork. Lee Kresner, wife an emotional supporter of the artist, is the loyal and faithful woman who stood by Pollock's side in his worst moments, and who made it possible for her husband to succeed in the changing world of art.
  Ed Harris performance is 10/10. Whoever knows someone with such a complex mind as Pollock's, knows how well crafted his interpretation was. Marcia Gay Harden is terrific and also deserves a 10/10.

• Ed Harris
• Marcia Gay Harden
• Tom Bower
• Jennifer Connelly
• Bud Cort
• Val Kilmer

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