Pollock

Actor Ed Harris has spent much of the last decade reading and thinking about the alcoholic Action Painter whose drip, pour, slash and splash paintings became an international rage as well as whipping post for all things wrong with modern art. His thorough mental and physical immersion in Pollock’s milieu and mindset has spawned a terrific performance and competent directorial debut in a film that is just as frustrating and nonrelevatory as it is vivid and explosive. The film begins in 1950 at a swank New York art gallery reception and then escorts us to 1941 and slowly back again to Pollock’s death in a car wreck at the age of 44. This dark, calamitous time-hop sometimes confronts but never fully corrals Pollock’s personal and aesthetic ghosts—and rage.