(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

Watch the whole programme - 24 May 2002

MARK LAWSON:
Pollock, directed by and starring Ed Harris. Bonnie Greer, the difficulty in films like this is to try to show where the art comes from. Do you get any sense of where Pollock's art comes from?

BONNIE GREER:
Five minutes into the movie I knew Ed Harris had something to do with it on the other side of the camera. It had all the smell of - this is what I've always wanted to do and now I'm going to play this part. The movie is under water.

Harris is a great actor, but you never understand who Jackson Pollock is. You have to understand what fuels this man, what makes him paint, what makes this work.

Because Ed Harris was the exec producer and director of this, he never brings the movie up from out of under water. It's a tragedy in a sense, because Pollock was a great artist.

The moments when we see the paintings being done, which Harris had a coach help him with, are the most wonderful and powerful. It's a biopic for television, an afternoon television thing - the great man gets drunk, he does da-da-da, but that's because Harris couldn't direct it.

MARK LAWSON:
I thought it was better than most biopics, because if you have films about writers, there's that awful thing of them sitting at the typewriter - you can't show writing and it's hard to show painting but with Pollock the way he did it, it is dramatic, the act of painting. That was the great thing to be said for it.

MIRANDA SAWYER:
I completely disagree with you. There's a bit where you see him paint and he's got a big canvas and goes like this and it reminds me of the advert for Impulse where some girls goes, "I must express myself." It's just a kind of cliche.

And there's another time when he discovers the art of dripping paint. There's the cliche of when he drips it across and goes, "My God, that's the way forward!"

The strength of this film is in the scene we just saw a clip of. We see the only way the artist can do the art is to have somebody behind him who's feeding him, watering him, nurturing him, taking him away from the booze and keeping it clear so he can concentrate.

MARK LAWSON:
I thought there was a subtle connection because his paintings look like the city grid seen from above from a skyscraper or a plane.

There's a scene where he looks out of a window from above and then goes and does his paintings. I thought that connection was well made - the importance of height to him. But John Carey?

JOHN CAREY:
I thought the film really hovered between two theories about how an artwork gets its value. One, as you say, they are created by geniuses and the initiate can go along and say it's genius, as they do.

The other theory is different, that value isn't intrinsic in the artwork but what we put it into it. All kinds of socio-economic factors are at work. Most of it was the great genius theory, as Bonnie says.

But the way in which Peggy Guggenheim and her helpers were a bit satirised, there it was implied they were doing it for money and so these theories seem to clash.

MARK LAWSON:
As John suggests, the problem in these films is always that moment when it's "Picasso, have you met Matisse?" In this case the key figure is his patron Peggy Guggenheim.

VT CLIP FROM THE FILM "POLLOCK"

MARK LAWSON:
A Peggy Guggenheim moment. That character comes off the screen.

BONNIE GREER:
It was completely artificial. Harris approached this character on his knees. Pollock was God to him. He made the movie like that.

As a result you get, for me it was a stagey performance. I didn't believe the character of Peggy Guggenheim. She was a very erudite, interesting woman, she wouldn't have said "I am Peggy Guggenheim".

MARK LAWSON:
Some of the books I have read, I think there was that element in her character.

BONNIE GREER:
She wouldn't have said that, of course that's her and she doesn't climb stairs. But it's that part that Harris is directing himself, he's building a character. He's not paying attention to things.

MARK LAWSON:
That's the problem - the visual style - because it's more Hopper than it is Pollock. You couldn't have made it like Pollock, you'd have had to just drop cans of film on the floor.

JOHN CAREY:
It's fair to say it's a beautiful film. The countryside scenes, the water flowing is very beautiful. Also, as Bonnie says, when he does the painting, they use music to bring out the rhythms.

Very few people can recognise rhythms in visual art and music, and you get it. When he did the Guggenheim mural, that was a beautiful scene.

MARK LAWSON:
Well, Pollock hasn't made the splash some people might have hoped but it opens at selected cinemas in the UK today.