Word: pollock
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...hard to come by. That was when people started telling us that "greatness" in art is a subjective business, culturally constructed and so forth, and this neat device let them pretend that (save me your howls of anguish) Toni Morrison deserves a Nobel Prize in literature, or that Jackson Pollock's paint-spattered canvases are 20th century versions of the Mona Lisa, or that Elton John deserves a knighthood...
...MARCIA GAY HARDEN POLLOCK There's this really fearless quality to her, this dark side," says Ed Harris, who directed and played opposite Harden in the brutally honest biography of the self-absorbed, self-destructive and sullenly inarticulate genius of American action painting. "She's not afraid to be ugly." Or, as it turns out, to admit even at this late date that she doesn't fully understand her character, Pollock's wife Lee Krasner, who pretty much abandoned her painting career to support his. She guesses Krasner "sacrificed what she sacrificed" because "she loved him first and foremost...
...POLLOCK...
There are two things you have to say about Jackson Pollock: he figured out a way to paint as no one before him ever had, and he was, as a human being, a shambles--drunken, depressed, disloyal and near to moronically inarticulate. The only way to approach his short and miserable life (he died in a possibly suicidal car crash at age 44) is as an insoluble mystery, and that's precisely what Harris, the star, director and co-producer of Pollock, does...
Harris' great performance has a kind of blank grimness; it contains not a single moment of charm or self-awareness. Harris never allows his exhibitions of Pollock's inexplicable gift to soften or redeem the man's monstrousness. The result is a harrowing film, impossible to "like" in any conventional way, hypnotically impossible to turn away from...