Bald-faced truth from Ed Harris

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WASHINGTON - America's coolest bald guy enters the Four Seasons restaurant to a chorus of bewilderment. All the well-heeled lunchers stare in that discreet way of the bourgeoisie, nothing loud and crude but nevertheless radiant with muted curiosity. They know this guy, but who is this guy? He is so familiar, so intense, so, er, bald.

Is it Mr. Clean? Daddy Warbucks? Michael Jordan, in negative reversal?

Actually, no, but the charisma quotient is high enough. Dressed in black, thin of silhouette, graceful and powerful, armored from the world behind eyes so piercingly blue they could be a professional killer's, Ed Harris pays no attention to the stir he is causing. He doesn't notice, or if he notices he doesn't care.

Although he's been on magazine covers and all over the nation's bijoux for the better part of two decades, Harris still occupies that strange zone of almost-but-not-quite recognizability. But he may have finally come up the final notch, to excite genuine genuflection and uncontrollable gushing by strangers at his mere presence. The change would be in concert with his Best Actor Oscar nomination for "Pollock," in which he plays the '50s' most flamboyant artist-hero. He was quite possibly helped by the film's excellent director: himself.

But Harris is too focused on other matters to pay attention to the frivolousness of the Oscar ritual. For it soon becomes clear that for Harris, "Pollock" is not just another movie, like "The Rock" and "Absolute Power" and "Stepmom," but rather a kind of Grail, the culmination of a 10-year quest.

It looks, without fear or favor, at the primal force that was Jackson Pollock and probes not merely his genius but also his anger, his alcoholism, his abuse, his violence. It looks at his crazed ending in 1956: upside down in a convertible on Long Island, amid women to whom he was not married, in a stench of alcohol, gasoline and lost possibilities. It's a tough picture, raw and unblinking and ultimately mysterious.

The whole thing began so innocently for Harris. His dad happened to see a new biography in a bookstore about the painter's life and early wretched death (but great career move) and noticed what many have noticed since: that Ed Harris and Jackson Pollock look surprisingly alike. Both were baldies, with strong, lean faces, and an intense projection of masculinity, but both also seemed to have a cemetery wind blowing through the caverns of their skulls, which gave them a sense of the tragic; both seemed to somehow "control" the space they occupied. Both gave themselves up to work in powerful ways. Both smoked, usually with unfiltered butts hanging loosely from dry lips as they concentrated on something else.

"Dad sent it along and said, `Maybe there's a movie in this guy.' And that's how I met Jackson Pollock for the first time," Harris recalls.

He read Jeffrey Potter's "To a Violent Grave," an oral history of Pollock by his intimate friends, and the great biography "Jackson Pollock: An American Saga," by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith. Then there was the usual movie garbage about scripts and financing and rights and dealing with the estate, and this and that.

And Harris had to learn to paint. "You've got to paint," he says.

"Pollock tried to put the act of painting on canvas. That was his revelation. I began early on, at the tail end of the '80s and through the '90s. ... The idea of what it is to be a painter, of finding something that works for you, that was very important. I tried to create things that had harmonics and rhythms. I didn't always succeed, but it was about the effort. I got an inkling of what it was about to look down at that board."

In Pollock's case, that sense of reality was especially important, for it was captured in a famous short film by Hans Namuth that, whatever one's opinion of Pollock's art, certainly makes the genuineness of his artistic passion unforgettable. Namuth photographed someone more demon than man, who assaulted his canvas with utter death-battle intensity, that iconic cigarette hanging from his lips, his brow a tangle of tormented musculature. At the time, a snooty mass-cult magazine called him "Jack the Dripper," which was a joke but still caught the urgency of the act, and possibly even the pathology of it.

That ordeal - the stoical, almost inarticulate Pollock allowing his most private agonies to be captured on film - is a key moment in the two-hour Harris movie, which takes Pollock from a tongue-tied nobody in the early 1940s to the most famous painter in the world by the early 1950s to a bitter, alcoholic wreck by his death.

What was his problem? This is a serious question none of his biographers or interpreters seems able to answer. What drove him? Why could he paint like an angel yet seethe like a monster, once upturning the Thanksgiving table and throwing the many admirers and colleagues who had gathered at his Long Island place out into the night? Why did he so publicly humiliate his wife, the painter Lee Krasner (portrayed by Marcia Gay Harden, who also got an Oscar nod), and turn on his best friends? Why did he pee in Peggy Guggenheim's fireplace during a dinner party?

"He was a young man at odds with the world," Harris says intently (although "Harris says intently" could be pinned to every quote he offers, except when he consults the menu and wonders, "What's vermicelli?").

"He was the youngest of five and the family moved around, from dirt farm to dirt farm. He never fit in. And all the brothers left, one by one, and all of them were painters. He was looking for something. You look at his early paintings and drawings and you see him searching for something to fulfill his purpose. He pursues it intently. He's not satisfied just drawing pictures. He fights through the influence of others. And finally he arrives at something truly original, and he did all this despite having the emotional maturity of a 12-year-old."

In Harris' film, he's a man who simmers in obscurity, then relishes his rise to the top and the attention of important critics and mainstream media. He seemed unaware how hard his wife was working on his behalf, doing the networking and the wooing necessary for a big New York success. And he seemed totally unprepared for what happened next, which was that he was simply over, as in, goodbye, we're bored, someone new and younger is coming along. When Pollock's 10 years of limelight were over, he grew bitter and alcoholic and frequently violent.

"It's not a movie about making judgments," says Harris (intently!). "I didn't feel I had to comment on his behavior by the way it was shot."

The movie is elegantly quiet, without technical dazzle. Shot largely on Pollock's actual property on Long Island and the house where he lived (with permission from the estate), it's a work of minimalist technique, with long, slow takes and plenty of room for the actors to define their characters.

"I was not interested in exploring innovative techniques," Harris says. "Whenever I was in doubt, I simply trusted simplicity. Most of the ideas that I had that I thought were cool - you don't see them in the movie. They didn't work. The simple stuff is best."

Harris attracted some high-visibility talent to the project, even though it was his first shot at directing and the budget was low ("More than a million, less than $10 million. That's all I can say."). His wife, Amy Madigan, appears as heiress Peggy Guggenheim, who first supported Pollock's work even though he so famously relieved himself in her fireplace (another great career move). Jennifer Connelly plays Pollock's last mistress (and only survivor of the car wreck), Jeffrey Tambor is the influential critic Clement Greenberg, who first discovered Pollock, and John Heard and Val Kilmer portray artists Tony Smith and Willem de Kooning. The old "Harold and Maude" star Bud Cort is aboard, as Howard Putzel, who was Guggenheim's art bloodhound, sniffing out new sensations for her to back.

Though New York by inclination, artistic by nature and intense by genetic luck, Harris about as anti-arty as you can imagine. He played high school football well enough to get himself a ride to Columbia University but left after two years, feeling overwhelmed by New York.

It was in Oklahoma, not the theater capital of the world, where he began to act. An early community theater performance as King Arthur filled him "with an ecstasy I had never felt. That feeling lasted about 10 minutes and I said, 'Wow!' I've got to learn how to do this!' "

That led to drama studies at the University of Oklahoma, then at the California Institute of the Arts, where he got his degree. Early progress was slow, much onstage, and at the margins of movies like "Coma."

By the early '80s he had gotten the fat John Glenn part in "The Right Stuff" and ended up on Newsweek's cover; he followed it up with a blistering portrait of a mercenary in "Under Fire," virtually stealing the film from putative star Nick Nolte. He's spent the better part of the intervening years playing featured roles in big films, which he almost always stole, and bigger roles in smaller films.

He won his first Oscar nomination (supporting) for the 1995 film "Apollo 13," when he played flight director Gene "Failure is not an option" Kranz. He won another for his role as Christof, the producer, in "The Truman Show," with Jim Carrey.

He is asked if there was a moment on "Pollock" when he knew he'd gotten where he wanted to get.

"My big fear," he says, "is that it just wouldn't work. There might be some good stuff, but it wouldn't amount to something. And in the editing room, I finally realized that it was going to work at some level. I suddenly knew what I was looking at."