Painting Pictures: Pollock (Dir Ed Harris, 2h4m, 2000)

Pollock theactrical poster

Cinema loves the tormented artist; the painter, the sculptor, the architect, the writer, and even the fellow film-maker. The painter, in particular, real or imagined, seems to entrance the cinematic eye; there's no shortage of directors who also paint or draw; Kurosawa, Lynch, Del Toro, Hopper, Wajda and Jarman are among their ranks, and some of them have made films about painters. Even those directors and scriptwriters who restrict their artistry to film often borow from their imagery or style; Andrei Tarkovsky, the director of Andrei Rubelev, described his films as 'sculpting in time' and one of the first books to discuss the technical side of cinematography, by veteran cinematographer, John Alton, is entitled 'Painting with Light' (1949). Over the next month we will consider biopics of four major artists; Van Gogh, Turner, Basquiat. We will begin with Pollock, directed by, and starring, Ed Harris as the tortured American abstract expressionist.

Jackson Pollock is a contradictory artist, and Pollock, by this nature, is a contradictory film. For my part, I've often considered Pollock as I consider fellow abstract artist, Mark Rothko; a sense of pure painting, absolutely, and impressive in their grand scale, but abstract to the point of being little more than a Rorschach test for the viewer, Pollock's swirls and drips and streaks, often against fields of colour or bare canvas, subject to multiple perspectives and intepretations. Imitable? Absolutely. Often derided? Undoubtedly? Yet, Pollock, like his paintings, is a film of layers, working up from bare canvas; take one layer away, and another meaning seems to appear, revealling different views of Pollock.

In the Studio: Jackson Pollock (Ed Harris) and Lee Krasner (Marcia Gay Harden)

Ed Harris understood this, in the early 90s, when introduced to Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, the meticulously researched, Pulitzer-prize winning biography by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith. So immediately taken by Pollock's story, Harris dedicated the next decade to making a biopic of the artist's life story, with such method school exactness that he learnt to paint in Pollock's 'Action' style. Thus, the first layer takes shape; the year is 1940; Pollock is living with his brother and his wife in the Village in New York, occasionally exhibiting in group exhibitions with other struggling artists. He soon meets Lee Krasner (Marcia Gay Harden, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance), who soon becomes Pollock's champion, whilst his friend introduces him to Howard Putzel (Bud Cort), an employee of wealthy art collector, Peggy Guggenheim (Amy Madigan).

From here on, as the film covers the production of the colossal 'Mural (1943)' for Guggenheim's house, including Pollock's creative block before a manic-and historically debunked-single day of painting produces the colossal work that towers across the space of Pollock's flat. Certainly, this is where Harris' months of painting practice is at its best; the montages in which he paints have an astonishing energy of their own. However, Pollock finds his work is not selling, and, once married to Krasner, develops his 'drip painting' technique in a farm outbuilding, braving all weather conditions to produce the most famous pieces of art of his career, and finally becoming the face and art of the avant-garde scene in a profile in Life magazine, and an upswing in his fame, leading to an interlude in which he signs a copy of the magazine

At this point, though, the film confronts us, with a second layer; interwoven with the first, like Pollock's layers of paint; Jackson Pollock is an alcoholic. Jackson Pollock: An American Saga not only discusses this at length, but also Pollock's mental health problems; all of this is stunningly rendered by Harris, from the film's opening sequences, to multiple vignettes, all of which cast Harris-as-Pollock in a raw light, one of the sequences seeing him wake in an alley to the curiosity of a small child watching from a window. Harris, further, does not pull the trick of lesser biopics and suggest some tangible link between the alcoholism, the depression, the trips to therapists, and his work-this fillm is no hagiography.

The Many Layers of Jackson Pollock; Harris at work on one of the film's many recreations of the artist's paintings

Instead, we immediately see how it stifles and blunts his creativity. His second meeting with his patron, Peggy Guggenheim is a messy affair, Pollock clearly drunk, and having wandered out of the house, his would-be patron furious, and Harris spatters the film with these incidents, these outbursts, where the bottle gets the better of him, where he either becomes boorish, or frustratingly self-sabotaging, the most brutal of these scenes where, surrounded by his supporters, and a film maker keen to document him as he works, he upends the Thanksgiving table, and the most pathetic a precipitous fall from his bicycle, trying to balance a full crate of beer, only to over balance and sit, sprawled, among broken bottles.

But it is this final layer, that of Lee Krasner, Pollock's wife, long-term champion and long-suffering supportor, that the film truly concentrates upon. We see her immediately grow close to him, despite his alcoholism, and his neuroticism, becoming his manager, and practically dragging him into fame through her connections, eventually marrying him. Yet, at the same time, the film balances this with the savagery of Pollock at his worst; it is she that is the target of much of Pollock's worst alcoholic behaviour, his attacks, his belittling of her, his demands for them to have a child. Harden's performance is fantastic: a woman at once torn between the clear love for her husband and having to live with him. The final third of the film, in which the film leaps forward to after Pollock's time in the limelight, depicts a woman beaten down by her partner's womanising, and alcoholism, finally becomes too much for her.

Yet, it is Krasner who became Pollock's great advocate, and it is through her that established his lasting reputation as an artist. Pollock, for its part, is a superbly made film, Harris' work behind, and in front of the camera to bring one of the 20th Century's most controverisal artists, and his work to life, matched by a superb performance from Marcia Gay Harden, as Lee Krasner, as the driving force behind the man and his body of work.

Rating: Highly Recommended

Pollock is available to stream via AppleTV, and on DVD and BluRay from  Sony Pictures. It is also currently available via AppleTV and on DVD and BluRay from Sony Pictures in the US.

Next week, we continue with portraits of painters, as we consider the death of Vincent Van Gogh in the exquistely made Loving Vincent.

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