Saturday, January 13, 2007

After a couple of false starts, the film gets going in 1942, when Krasner presents herself at the apartment that Pollock shares with his brother and sister-in-law. It's an obvious point of takeoff; he wasn't floundering, but his drinking had run amok, and it was Krasner who made the effort to dry him out and set him on the true path. From here, we leap and lurch to the staging posts of his remaining fourteen years. We get Peggy Guggenheim (Amy Madigan in a fright wig) stomping up to his studio; she offers him first a contract and then her body - something of a coup since it wasn't just anyone who got a contract with Peggy Guggenheim. We get reconstructions of the stills and documentary films that Hans Namuth took of the artist at work - an exposure so intimate that Pollock fled back to the comfort of the bottle. And we get Ruth Kligman (Jennifer Connelly), who becme Pollock's squeeze in the final months; when you first see her, leaning over the side of his car in a summer dress, it does feel like a relief - the hint of an idyll after years of cyclonic marriage. Never mind the Pollocks, here's the sex kitten.

At regular intervals, the painter is seen hanging out with other painters; Willem de Kooning, for instance, is played by Val Kilmer, which suggests that casting too, can be a form of abstract experssionism...

The last Michael Bay film, Armageddon, was a handy guide to what you should do when an asteroid bumps into your planet. At the time, most critics scorned the picture as deafening and dumb; in retrospect, it feels like a mature, even witty, exercise in self-reference, considering that the effect of watching a Michael Bay film is indistinguishable from having a large, pointy lump of rock drop on your head.

There is a scene in the middle of The Saint that may in time be viewed as a critical moment in American movies. The Saint (Val Kilmer) and his young, beautiful, poetry-reading, world-changing-scientist sidekick Emma (Elizabeth Shue) - in short, his girl - are rushing through watery tunnels in the bowels of modern Moscow. Our man is in a fix: the exits are blocked, and there are Russian-mafia goons coming up behind. Salvation arrives in the shape of a young, dark, beautiful, beret-wearing, gun-toting Russian art dealer who appears from the shadows, ushers him and Emma into a secret chamber, and tries to sell them some icons. When this attempt fails, she offers to lead them underground to the sanctuary of the American embassy, pausing only to deliver an outrageous product placement for our hero's waterproof watch. As the action unfolded, I sat there with my jaw resting lightly on the floor, and I thought, This is it. This is what we have been heading for all these years. Here is a film that makes no sense at all.