Pollock
D: Ed Harris; with Harris, Marcia Gay Harden, Amy Madigan, John Heard, Val Kilmer, Jennifer Connelly.
He rages. He howls. He drinks and sobs and drinks some more. He literally throws himself into his canvas. And in the end, Jackson Pollock became one of the most famous and most imitated artists of the 20th century. Adapted from the award-winning biography Jackson Pollock: An American Saga by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, this ambitious biopic attempts to show the genesis of the artist’s infamous drip paintings as well as the messy personal struggles which propelled him into unexplored territory. The vastly underappreciated Ed Harris makes his directing debut and stars as the artist himself, who lived in Greenwich Village with his painter wife, Lee Krasner, played by the vastly underappreciated Marcia Gay Harden (the tough, sensual femme fatale of Miller’s Crossing). Expect cameos from Harris’ wife Amy Madigan (Peggy Guggenheim), Val Kilmer (Willem de Kooning), and others as Pollock re-creates the bohemian Shangri-La that was post-war Greenwich Village. (Feb. TBA)
This article appears in November 24 • 2000.