This is quite a transition from John Glenn to the iconoclastic Paul Jackson Pollock. While going to the College for Creative Studies I got to know more about the various movements and styles of Art that have predominated down through the centuries. Pollock's stuff is great, and Ed Harris got his style of creation right improvising brush strokes the way one improvises notes in progressive jazz or phrases of words in projective or free verse. All the time striving for a formal quality such as you would ironically find in a training exercise in the Martial Arts or a kata. This is also emphasized and underlined by the accompanying musical score of Jeff Beal. I have gotten to know a few abstract artists in my time, the great Gilda Snowden being the most preeminent in our area when it came to Abstract Expressionism. Its inside-out energy and vigor is at once intriguing and compelling as it rivets the attention.
My own personal experience with abstract Art has mostly been that of an accidental encounter. But I can easily recognize those who have a gift for it. That is, for creating from within one's self rather than constantly referencing from external surroundings or even material Nature itself. Pollock would probably agree with me that the true canvas is one's own soul. This film graphically displays how Pollock captured his own angst and anguish in what he may have considered a vain attempt to transcend it.
Film is not live theater, where the revelation often comes from a spoken line of dialogue or the sudden interaction and confrontation between two or more main characters. Sometimes the reason for being of a film is particularly contained in one absorbing image or scene. The beginning of this film stays with me where Ed Harris as Jackson Pollock is caught by Marcia Gay Harden as Lee Krasner in a moment of deep reflection or reverie. I believe he has just signed a woman's copy of LIFE magazine that has an article about him in it and you can see it in his face. This fan of his work and celebrity is treating him as though he has made it. But you can see the damage to his psyche recorded in the devastation upon his face. He knows he hasn't made it even though he tried his utmost to do so. It's an interior monologue that is unforgettable and to which Harris as director returns to near the end of the film. In the East, the practice of an art is supposed to bring inner peace and a sense of self mastery. But we see none of that in the visage of Pollock that Harris brings us. Instead, upon this face we see the smouldering remains of a battleground where the war for self has been lost. The sense that he is somewhat amused that the very thing he thought would enlarge him has to a very marked extent diminished him, made him less of what he is rather than more of what he is somehow. He is not particularly tripping or in heart ache about it. It is more of a '- what do you know? I am here now and it is different from what I thought it would be -'. For my money, it's a great movie moment that redeems the predictability of 'The Artist as a tortured Soul' theme that inevitably runs as a main strand throughout the rest of the picture.
That Pollock neither finds inner peace or self mastery in Abstract Expressionism for all his labors makes for a beautiful movie. That these were his aims is evident in the frenzy of his working method and the genius of his results. Quixotic as his efforts may have been and doomed to failure due to somehow choosing the wrong means to achieve the right ends, it is the striving for that ideal thing and finding at last the soul in desolation which perhaps unites all artists with the rest of humanity. This is also perhaps the angst of the West that very often gives high value to the artifacts and remains of dead cultures and civilizations rather than to the living process of Life itself. Harris' Pollock searches for something that is not there and loses a part of himself in trying to find it.
Therefore this film leaves you to praise the effort if not the final result in the life of a man. You praise the Art and the body of work while abhorring the kind of life from which it was spawned. It has always fascinated me how much of society looks up to artists as higher beings when their personalities reveal them to be as riddled with flaws and failings as anyone else. Jackson Pollock was certainly battling his demons, and Barbara Turner's screenplay gives a fair assessment of his highly charged personality as well as his shortcomings in interpersonal relationships. Val Kilmer gives us a memorable cameo as Willem DeKooning and Jennifer Connelly as Ruth Kligman helps us to feel the full fury of Pollock's unbalanced destructive impulses, while revealing to us in her relationship to him that very lack of inner peace and self mastery that drove him to have ethical feet of clay.
My own personal experience with abstract Art has mostly been that of an accidental encounter. But I can easily recognize those who have a gift for it. That is, for creating from within one's self rather than constantly referencing from external surroundings or even material Nature itself. Pollock would probably agree with me that the true canvas is one's own soul. This film graphically displays how Pollock captured his own angst and anguish in what he may have considered a vain attempt to transcend it.
Film is not live theater, where the revelation often comes from a spoken line of dialogue or the sudden interaction and confrontation between two or more main characters. Sometimes the reason for being of a film is particularly contained in one absorbing image or scene. The beginning of this film stays with me where Ed Harris as Jackson Pollock is caught by Marcia Gay Harden as Lee Krasner in a moment of deep reflection or reverie. I believe he has just signed a woman's copy of LIFE magazine that has an article about him in it and you can see it in his face. This fan of his work and celebrity is treating him as though he has made it. But you can see the damage to his psyche recorded in the devastation upon his face. He knows he hasn't made it even though he tried his utmost to do so. It's an interior monologue that is unforgettable and to which Harris as director returns to near the end of the film. In the East, the practice of an art is supposed to bring inner peace and a sense of self mastery. But we see none of that in the visage of Pollock that Harris brings us. Instead, upon this face we see the smouldering remains of a battleground where the war for self has been lost. The sense that he is somewhat amused that the very thing he thought would enlarge him has to a very marked extent diminished him, made him less of what he is rather than more of what he is somehow. He is not particularly tripping or in heart ache about it. It is more of a '- what do you know? I am here now and it is different from what I thought it would be -'. For my money, it's a great movie moment that redeems the predictability of 'The Artist as a tortured Soul' theme that inevitably runs as a main strand throughout the rest of the picture.
That Pollock neither finds inner peace or self mastery in Abstract Expressionism for all his labors makes for a beautiful movie. That these were his aims is evident in the frenzy of his working method and the genius of his results. Quixotic as his efforts may have been and doomed to failure due to somehow choosing the wrong means to achieve the right ends, it is the striving for that ideal thing and finding at last the soul in desolation which perhaps unites all artists with the rest of humanity. This is also perhaps the angst of the West that very often gives high value to the artifacts and remains of dead cultures and civilizations rather than to the living process of Life itself. Harris' Pollock searches for something that is not there and loses a part of himself in trying to find it.
Therefore this film leaves you to praise the effort if not the final result in the life of a man. You praise the Art and the body of work while abhorring the kind of life from which it was spawned. It has always fascinated me how much of society looks up to artists as higher beings when their personalities reveal them to be as riddled with flaws and failings as anyone else. Jackson Pollock was certainly battling his demons, and Barbara Turner's screenplay gives a fair assessment of his highly charged personality as well as his shortcomings in interpersonal relationships. Val Kilmer gives us a memorable cameo as Willem DeKooning and Jennifer Connelly as Ruth Kligman helps us to feel the full fury of Pollock's unbalanced destructive impulses, while revealing to us in her relationship to him that very lack of inner peace and self mastery that drove him to have ethical feet of clay.