"I Am Nature"

by Sasha Stone

Jackson Pollock constantly felt 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 what is required in viewing the character Pollock, as well as the film.

Director, producer and star Ed Harris didn't feel like glamorizing Pollock, which is surprising. If there was one painter upon whom we project our most belligerent rebel fantasies, it would be Pollock - a hard drinker and womanizer who painted like a mad genius but crashed through everything else, until finally he crashed his car, killing himself and his companion.

Most great art forgives artists their horrible personalities, yet in Pollock we see no real compassion for a man on whom Harris has meditated for the fifteen years it took to get the project off the ground. Most biographies of this sort give us something to adore in these horrible people. But here is a stark, disturbing look at a very troubled man, who was 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, convinced that the man had no redeemable traits beyond his extraordinary talent To this end, Harris' film is in danger of playing 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 its fingernails. The artist signs the program, and then we see his face. At first glance he seems 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 and his relationship with Lee Krasner.

Marcia Gay Harden plays Krasner with such an ease that you may 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, but she sets her own life aside to help make Pollock 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 at worse. Once he starts believing he can live without her, that's when we see how fragile and crippled he is.

Harris is making a point here - Pollock would have been dead 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 could be.

As for the film itself, it tips a little too 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 a bit for this, and the end drags on tediously, livened up momentarily by the leggy beauty Jennifer Connelly, who plays Pollock's mistress.

But there are several factors that move the film along - whenever Harris is painting as Pollock. The key to his work is that Lee Krasner kept him painting, and painting saved him from the endless despair with which he was afflicted. 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 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 - and when the two inevitably merge we see what it must have been like for Pollock, and for Guggenheim, to live up to what was expected of them. Harris looks so much like the Pollock of our collective memory that it's 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; you can practically smell the paint, and feel the ache he must have had in his back from stooping over.

Harris is best at exposing Pollock for the frightened child he really was. Two key scenes exhibit this beautifully - one is when he can't stop talking about himself at a family party, when all they want to do is live their lives - they don't care about him and it cleaves his heart. The other is right after a filmmaker has directed Pollock to, essentially, fake his painting for a film by just showing his technique in a variety of contrived shots. At the end of it (which is the beginning of the end for him) he repeats an awkward phrase over and over, "I'm not the phony, you're the phony."

Equally odd, and one of the real indications of Harris' directorial talent, is the strange dynamic between Pollock and his mother, who whispers bizarre sentences in her son's head when they come together for an embrace. You barely hear it, but he hears it. Harris chooses not to explain Pollock's complicated relationship with his mother, but you get the sense there's something twisted going on.

Even though this film was Harris' baby, he might have been better off concentrating on one role - either taking on the challenge of the part, or else being the director. There is a sense of both aspects being almost great, but just barely missing. Even so, the film contains arguably the best performances (Harris and Gay Harden) of the year, and displays true promise from Ed Harris as a director.

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, it's as Pollock says - he is nature. And there's really no explaining him. There's just the beauty of his work - which, surely, is enough.

CineScene, 2001