Talkin’ ’bout my trepanation (2/19/01)
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Pollock. [Ed Harris, 2001. Screenplay by Barbara Turner and Susan Emshwiller; after a book by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith.]
Ed Harris/Jackson Pollock washes out of the Army as a chainsmoking nerve case, lives as a parasite on his brother’s household in New York, meets Marcia Gay Harden, does some fairly nice but obviously derivative painting, hits it moderately big, fences with the critics, pisses in a patron’s fireplace during a reception, does some more painting, moves out to Long Island, breaks through with the invention of a style that involves dripping paint off a stick and flinging it around the canvas, hits it really big, and drinks himself to death. All this is absolutely true to life and completely riveting. — With Stephanie Seymour and Jennifer Connelly as art groupies [you wish], and Val Kilmer obviously relishing his turn as Willem de Kooning. — The usual platitudes about the evils of alcoholism are avoided. What Harris manages to convey perfectly is the sense of a guy who is constantly skating around the edge of a nervous breakdown, literally hanging by his fingernails above the abyss, whose only valid strategy for survival is to drink himself into stupefaction. [Also the native existential situation of the American poet; compare, e.g., Robert Lowell or John Berryman.] — With the use of modern clinically approved psychoactive substances, on the other hand, a man like Pollock could spend a productive career watching television with a vaguely puzzled expression; undoubtedly to the greater profit of society and the legitimate drug industry.
Ms. Harden, of course, won a richly-deserved Academy Award for her portrayal of Pollock’s longsuffering wife Lee Krasner [herself a painter of some repute.] But mainly here you look at Ed Harris, a guy who has had in his career the opportunity to play John Glenn, E. Howard Hunt, and Jackson Pollock, and you have to think the life of an actor doesn’t suck.
____________Totally busted (2/14/01)
