The movie doesn't help explain anything. It skitters around, leapfrogging months and years at a time, frequently without any segue. Characters appear with no explanation. Relationships develop with no background. Pollock meets his eventual wife, Lee Krasner (Marcia Gay Harden, who got a Best Supporting Actress nomination), in one scene, goes to bed with her (rather unenthusiastically) the second time he meets her, and in practically the next scene, has a breakdown -- and it seems to be assumed that Krasner, not Pollock's brother or mother, will take care of him. For all the audience knows, this could be their third date... or they could have been living together for months. There's no context. As an art critic (Jeffrey Tambor) says of one of Pollock's early shows, "Muddiness abounds." I got a little sense of why Pollock was so groundbreaking, but only a very little.
Neither of the protagonists is very sympathetic. Pollock is a self-absorbed, thoughtless jerk, an alcoholic spoiled brat who's the unsavory combination of a crybaby with a bad temper. I spent much of the movie wishing Krasner would just shut up -- her Noo Yawk accent is positively skin-crawling -- and she's an odd blend of pushy and spineless: she touts Pollock to potential art patrons more aggressively and obnoxiously than even he sells himself, yet she lets him walk all over her. He rarely acknowledges her painting, and we almost never see her work.
When they get married and move to the country, he's briefly a likable character (the hoary saw that city = bad and country = good), but then he apparently discovers that you can get booze in the Hamptons as well as in Brooklyn, and their little pastoral idyll falls to pieces as he reverts to jackass mode. Yawn. The last time I felt this much distaste for both halves of a married couple in a movie was when I watched Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, to which this bears some similarities. Honestly, if I were around these people in real life, I'd get up and leave the room, and that's what I felt like doing quite often during Pollock.
I will say that I was impressed that Ed Harris clearly studied Pollock's painting technique -- we actually see him painting whole canvases, not just dabbing in a spot or two like you usually see actors playing painters do. And shadows and light are used very well in the movie -- the scene where Pollock and Krasner first make love is beautifully composed, with both actors completely dark against a lit background, like shadow puppets. Later, there's a lovely scene where Pollock's shadow is thrown across a mural as he works, making it seem like two Pollocks are painting at once. But those pleasures are few and far between.
I suppose some of you will want to see this for the same reason I saw Chocolat -- because it's nominated in two of the major Oscar categories. But for those of you who don't feel that weird compulsion and who are thinking of seeing it because you're looking for an insightful, cogent portrait of the artist... don't bother.
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