It seems a safe bet that Ed Harris would not have been interested in directing himself in the role of the leading light of American Action Painting (notwithstanding his uncanny resemblance to him from the eyebrows up) unless the painter were also a violent alcoholic who could be counted upon to pee in Peggy Guggenheim's fireplace, overturn the Thanksgiving-dinner table, and kill himself in a car wreck at age forty-four. In short: another tormented artist. For the uninitiated, the movie can be educational about the living and working conditions of a New York artist (the bathtub and shower curtain smack-dab in the kitchen of a Greenwich Village garret) circa 1941-56, and about the short span of years during which Jackson Pollock produced the kinds of paintings in everyone's mental slide-carousel. And, emboldened by the "action" in Action Painting, it does take some time to show the artist at work, albeit in montage-y sequences accompanied by an orchestra of Aaron Copland-esque sewing machines. The unconvincing moment of epiphany when the artist absent-mindedly discovers the drip technique that earned him the monicker of "Jack the Dripper" would probably have been better left behind closed doors. All it lacks is a mysterious monolith and the opening bars of Also Sprach Zarathustra. His wife and fellow painter Lee Krasner, in a Betty Page haircut, enters the studio after his first day's work and proclaims at a glance, "You've done it, Pollock. You've cracked it wide open." (Why, in a movie set in New York City, is Marcia Gay Harden the only cast member to adopt a pronounced local accent?) The movie is not bad on Pollock's streak of post-Hemingway machismo -- drinking binges prominently included -- and his jealous defense of his hard-won status, no matter how far past his prime, as if it were the Heavyweight Championship belt. Amy Madigan, Jeffrey Tambor, Jennifer Connelly. (2000) — Duncan Shepherd
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