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POLLOCK
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"Paint is paint," declares art critic Clem Greenberg (Jeffrey Tabor) halfway through POLLOCK, "and surface is surface." Shortly thereafter, in an interview with LIFE Magazine, Jackson Pollock (Ed Harris) himself says, "you don't look at a flower and ask what it *means*. If people will forget all the nonsense and just *look* at the *painting* -- each word emphasized as if they hurt him to say -- "they will enjoy it."
Stunned into irrelevancy and Dadaism by the invention of the photograph, art groped for eighty years until abstract expressionists (like Piet Mondrian, Pollock, and Mark Rothko) found ways to display visually arresting and pleasing images that a photograph cannot make. (They are soon to be outflanked by computer graphics, but that's another story.) In the same flat way, this movie follows Pollock's life as a series of visual images not linked by purpose or meaning but by sequence.
Harris, who apparently spent ten years wanting to make this movie, shows us Pollock solely by his actions -- almost all of them boorish -- and his paintings, the only actions he cares about. As presented, Pollock is singularly inarticulate and clumsily mute … except when at the canvas. Then Harris does his best acting, all of it without words and solely with gestures, moving with liquid, sensual grace and concentration around the supine spread canvas, daubing it as if anointing a lover. "How do you know when you're done with a painting?" asks the LIFE interviewer. "How do you know when you're done making love?" replies Pollock more truly than he knows. For Pollock, lovemaking is painting and women are whores, his continual philandering abusive narcissism the effluvial discharge that purges his system so that he can then channel energy back into painting.
Harris is supported by a magnificent cast, all of whom sublimate their own stage instincts. Marcia Gay Harden does a great job as Lee Krasner. Amy Madigan proves how much she loves her real-life husband by donning nose-widening makeup, a shock of black hair, and a New York screech to be Peggy Guggenheim. Val Kilmer does a curious quirky turn as Willem de Kooning, and Bud Cort (HAROLD AND MAUDE) is fantastic but so unrecognizable I doubt you will be able to identify his character even with that clue.
Fiction, of course, loves the tortured artist because it makes for better story. And the whole codependent infrastructure of art criticism, art galleries, and art collectors seeks to place artists as a species apart, the better to justify their spiraling prices. With vocabulary even more pretentious than wine critics, they inflate the art beyond its surface, beyond its paint.
" I don't know much about art," says the consumer, almost defensively, "but I know what I like." To understand Jackson Pollock, click on http://www.nga.gov/feature/pollock/painting2.html and take a look at Lavender Mist. If you like that image, go see the movie.