Pollock's splash of inspiration

How do you know when a painting is finished, Mr Pollock?" asks the bemused Life Magazine reporter in Ed Harris's study of the giant of American Abstract Expressionism. How do you know when you ve finished making love? Pollock replies. It's a moment of rare articulacy on the part of the artist and Harris, starring in his own film, plays it beautifully.

He's an actor blessed with what feels like innate emotional intelligence; you can almost see him thinking on screen. Which is just as well because he has to do a lot of it in Pollock. The taciturn self-destructive genius who used Abstract Expressionism to chart not just his own tortured soul but the atavistic energy and rhythm of the American landscape is a challenge to any film-maker and this is Harris's debut. He acquits himself with honour rather than brilliance.

The film begins at the height of Pollock's fame in 1950, then flicks back nine years to the drunken wild boy,

abusive and depressive. Into his life walks artist Lee Krasner, fabulously played by Marcia Gay Harden ("You're a fine woman painter," Pollock comments; her raised eyebrow says it all.) She steadies, mothers, bullies and champions him. She sees him through his volatile relationship with the art dealer Peggy Guggenheim, getting him off the booze and out of New York to the country - great artists need the legend of substance abuse after their death, but when they're alive they need to get some work done.

Of course, biopics of famous artists have in-built fault lines of familiarity with greatness. There's the laughter-inducing "Hello Chopin, have you met Liszt?" problem (for Liszt read De Kooning). And then there is "inspiration". The revelatory drip-drip moment when Pollock discovers his trade- mark style comes when he's distracted and the paint splatters on to the floor. While the moment has the strength of simplicity, it also feels a little accidental for an artist who publicly denied accident in his work. Maybe it really happened. Since the movie doesn't distinguish fact from fiction, it's hard to tell.

In a way, Pollock is at its best when you know it is fiction. The relation-ship between Pollock and Krasner is the film's emotional backbone, and the scene where she refuses to have his baby because his genius doesn't leave room for more children in the house is searing; tender and violent by turns.

Pollock ends in iconic Fifties fashion, in a fast car with the smell of booze and death mingling. Paradoxically, despite all the words and images, the mystery of the artist stays intact. Which is maybe what Harris, a fan as much as a film-maker, intended.

Pollock
Cert: 18