The movie wears its period lightly. It gets rolling in postwar Greenwich Village. Everybody smokes all the time. Rents are cheap, but the first time Peggy Guggenheim visits Pollock's studio is almost the last: "I do not climb up five flights of stairs to nobody home!" Why did Pollock almost miss his first meeting with the famous patron? Some damn-fool reason. He had a knack for screwing up, and it's arguable that his career would never have happened if Lee Krasner hadn't poked her head around his door one day.
Krasner (played by Marcia Gay Harden, also Oscar nominated, who evokes enormous sympathy and patience) comes calling because she wants to see his paintings. She passes her hand over them as if testing their temperature. She knows they are good. She senses that Pollock takes little initiative in personal matters and takes charge of their relationship, undressing while Pollock is still looking for his cigarettes. She goes in with her eyes open. She knows she's marrying a troubled man, but stands by him and is repaid with a couple of happy years when they get a place in the country, and he doesn't drink. Then the troubles start again--a bottle of beer, a fight, an upset table at Thanksgiving and affairs with hero-worshipping girls like Ruth Klingman (Jennifer Connelly).
I don't know if Ed Harris knows how to paint, but he knows how to look like he's painting. There's a virtuoso scene where he paints a mural for Peggy's town house, utterly confident, fast and sure, in the flow. And others where we see the famous drip technique (and see that "anyone" could not do it). His judge and jury is the critic Clement Greenberg, played with judicious, plummy certainty by Jeffrey Tambor. He says what he thinks, praising early work and bringing Guggenheim around, then attacking later work as the world embraces it ("pretentious muddiness").
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