Huge
%white
O melette
Hom e made
SOUPS
wa ttles
addicted housewife in Angels in America.
"She was a Jewish woman making her
way in a world of WASP-y, macho
artists. She was not a virgin when she
married Pollock, which was unusual at
the time. She was smart, tenacious, a
survivor. I identify with her struggle,
her desire to find her own voice."
For Harden, that struggle began in
childhood, when she strove to upstage
her sisters as the third of five children
growing up in Japan, Germany,
Greece, California and Maryland.
A Greek-language production of
Medea at the Parthenon inspired her to
become a performer, though the New
York theater scene proved less than
welcoming. Harden subsisted on a
series of menial jobs, and was once left
with only $1 to survive the weekend.
A casting director handed her a plas-
tic surgeon's card and said, "You have
what I call the flaring-nostril look, and
unless you get it fixed, you will never
work." One winter morning, Harden
was so distraught that a homeless per-
son comforted her on the street.
Her big break came after she
enrolled in the graduate theater pro-
gram at New York University, when
she was cast as "Lucy, the Fat Pig" in a
zany production of The Comedy of
Errors. All she did was oink, jiggle her
huge, padded bum and her beanbag
breasts, which were the object of sever-
al sight gags. But that was enough to
catch the eye of the Coens' casting
director, who was looking for an
actress to play the Jewish vamp, Verna,
in Miller's Crossing.
Before long, the starving artist,
dolled up in smoky dark make-up, was
sitting across the table from Joel and
Ethan Coen, salivating over a
Lucullian smorgasbord of pastries and
cold cuts. Fortunately, the assertive
Verna took over.
"I just grabbed a cookie, lit up a cig-
arette and did the audition," Harden
says. "I was uncharacteristically aggres-
sive, which must have been the charac-
ter speaking."
The Coens had just one question for
the actress: "Is it a problem for you
playing a Jewish character?"
"I shook my head, 'No,' and that
was exactly the answer they needed,"
Harden says.
Nevertheless, she felt she needed to
educate herself by reading about the
kind of anti-Semitism her character
would have faced during the
Prohibition era. "I wanted to under-
stand what made Verna feel like an
outcast at the time, which informed all
of her choices," Harden says.
POLLOCK on page 60
Lo -col
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Making A Splash
sag es
Krasner character shines
in a flawed "Pollock."
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AUDREY BECKER
re artistic geniuses by nature self-
ish, arrogant, self-absorbed and
self-destructive? If not, why are we so
infatuated with the idea that they are?
In the latest incarnation of this popu-
lar myth, Ed Harris' cinematic
encomium to Abstract Expressionist
Jackson Pollock reiterates the familiar
archetype with visual flair.
In Pollock, Harris — who plays
the title role as well as directs —
convincingly metamorphoses into
the artist. He depicts
with admiration
many scenes in
which Pollock
drips and splatters
paint across canvas after canvas.
But the film accepts the "troubled
artist" formula too simplistically.
Instead of exploring the depths of
Pollock's particular genius, it distances
him by painting the character with
overly broad strokes.
Suggesting that the greatness of the
art exonerates the bad behavior of the
artist, the film recalls Woody Allen's
Deconstructing Harry. But Harris
misses the disturbing intricacies that
Allen's film so brilliantly traces.
From the very beginning of the
movie, Pollock is unapologetically
unlikable and miserable.
Unfortunately, we never learn why.
But Pollock does give a beautifully
nuanced portrait of another artist:
Lee Krasner — Pollock's wife —
played confidently by Marcia Gay
Harden. Krasner makes her appear-
ance with bravado, striding into
Pollock's studio to introduce herself.
She saves Pollock from himself But
in the process she relinquishes her own
gift as she promotes her husband.
While Pollock is a distressed savant,
barely able to complete an intelligible
sentence, Krasner becomes his voice,
articulating what he cannot.
When. Pollock's career takes off,
Krasner's dedication to his work
increases. She all but abandons the
brush, becoming instead bizarrely con-
tent with playing the roles of wife and •
spokesperson for her alcoholic husband.
In Harris' film, it is Krasner who
emerges as the far more interesting
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