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 Menu Making A Splash sag es Krasner character shines in a flawed "Pollock." Dine-In • Carry-Out .-Sat. 6:30 - 3:00, Sun. 8:00 - 3:00 Open Mon 7 1/2 OFF Special to the Jewish News A SPLASH on page 60 Fresh Baked at Free Muffins ca r€ fit tot 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. 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