Directed by and starring Academy Award® nominee (for Best Actor) Ed Harris (The Truman Show, The Rock), POLLOCK is a beautifully crafted, stunning drama about the legendary American painter Jackson Pollock.
Fellow artists and lovers Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner are at the center of New York's 1940s art scene, but as Krasner neglects her work to push Pollock's career forward, Pollock begins to unravel emotionally. Pollock and Krasner escape to the country and marry, and soon, Pollock creates work that makes him the first internationally-famous modern painter in America. But with fame and fortune comes a volatile temper and severe self-doubt; before long, Pollock's life threatens to explode. Featuring exceptional performances by a stellar cast, including Academy Award® winner Marcia Gay Harden (Meet Joe Black, The First Wives Club), Amy Madigan (Field of Dreams, Uncle Buck), Val Kilmer (The Saint, Heat) and Jennifer Connelly (Requiem for a Dream).
(56 votes)
2.
The long road to Pollock began when actor Ed Harris received a biography of Jackson Pollock from his father, who noticed that his son bore an uncanny resemblance to the artist. Harris's fascination with Pollock matched his physical similarity; the actor chose to direct and star in this impressive film biography. And his devotion assured a work of singular integrity, honoring the artist's achievement in abstract expressionism while acknowledging that Pollock was a tormented, manic-depressive alcoholic whose death at 44 (in a possibly suicidal car crash) also claimed the life of an innocent woman. The film also suggests that Pollock's success was largely attributable to the devotion of his wife, artist Lee Krasner, played with matching ferocity by Marcia Gay Harden in an Oscar®-winning performance.
In many respects a traditional biopic, Pollock begins in 1941 when Pollock meets Krasner, who encourages him and attracts the attention of supportive critic Clement Greenberg (Jeffrey Tambor) and benefactor Peggy Guggenheim (Amy Madigan). As Pollock rises from obscurity to international acclaim, Harris brings careful balance to his portrayal of a driven creator who found peace during those brief, sober periods when art brought release from his tenacious inner demons. The film offers sympathy without sentiment, appreciation without misguided hagiography. As an acting showcase it's utterly captivating. As a compassionate but unflinching exploration of Jackson Pollock's intimate world, there's no doubt that Harris captured the essence of a man whose life was as torturous as his art was redeeming. --Jeff Shannon
(53 votes)
3.
In August of 1949, Life Magazine ran a banner headline that begged the question: "Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" The article pictured Pollock in a now-famous pose, wearing a worn black jacket and blue jeans, his arms crossed defiantly over his chest and one of his kinetic canvasses stretched out behind him. Already well-known in the New York art world, he had become a household name-America's first "Art Star"-and his bold and radical style of painting continued to change the course of modern art. But the torments that had plagued the artist all of his life-perhaps the ones that drove him to paint in the first place, or that helped script his fiercely original art-continued to haunt him. As he struggled with self-doubt, engaging in a lonely tug-of-war between needing to express himself and wanting to shut the world out, Pollock began a downward spiral that would threaten to destroy the foundations of his marriage, the promise of his career, and-on one deceptively calm and balmy summer night in 1956-his life.
(49 votes)
4.
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.
(46 votes)
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