SYNOPSIS
Ed Harris’s POLLOCK is a moving portrait of artist Jackson Pollock, a leader of abstract expressionist painting whose work had major influence on the modern art movement. A serious alcoholic who was married to Lee Krasner, another prominent painter, the film illustrates Pollock’s rise to art world fame in the last 15 years of his life, and his subsequent surrender to the bottle which brought his death in 1956. In its best moments, POLLOCK shows Krasner (a strong, dynamic, and fascinating Marcia Gay Harden) and Pollock (a stern Harris) conversing about the progression of the modern movement while criticizing each other’s work from their adjoining studios in a tiny apartment in Manhattan’s East Village. Other highlights of the film include a handful of high energy painting sequences that demonstrate Pollock’s technique–the fluid straight-from-tube strokes of his earlier work and the more radical throwing, drizzling, and splattering of paint from the brush to the canvas in his later works; along with amusing depictions of the New York and Long Island art worlds with Peggy Guggenheim (Amy Madigan), Clement Greenberg (Jeffrey Tambor), Willem de Kooning (Val Kilmer), and Howard Putzel (Bud Cort) in the major roles. Based on the biography JACKSON POLLOCK: AN AMERICAN SAGA by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, the film has an uplifting musical score and a soundtrack that includes some of Pollock’s favorite jazz-blues tunes, both of which are welcome counterpoints to the movie’s darker moments.