Have you ever played the game in which several people are asked which person in history (or the arts, say) they would most like to meet? It can be rather revealing. But there are figures one most certainly would not want to meet, and on the evidence of Pollock, the great “action painter” is one of them. Biographical work can be tricky. I recently read two biographies of writers back to back: James Atlas’s book on Saul Bellow and David Sweetman’s on Mary Renault. Whether it was the subject matter per se, or the biographers’ writing, Bellow came out as a very dislikeable person, while Renault emerged as someone I’d have been very happy to bump into as she walked her dogs on Camps Bay beach. Pollock was made in 2000, with Ed Harris (recently seen playing, very powerfully, a man dying of Aids in The Hours) both directing and playing the lead. Why it has taken so long to get here is a bit of a mystery: surely Marcia Gay Harden’s Oscar win for Pollock counted for something? At any rate, Harris et al paint a very good portrait of the innovative artist whose heavy drinking led to his early death. Interestingly, the script is by two women, Barbara Turner and Susan Emshwiller, though based on a book by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith. They show, first, how deeply Pollock was indebted to his wife, Lee Krasner (Harden), herself a painter, and, second, how abominably he treated her. It doesn’t try to excuse his behaviour, simply to show him as a whole person.Pollock is often the butt of the ignorance of people with no time for any art made after the 19th century or in the style of the 19th century. “My three-year-old could have painted that!” they say. In the case of Pollock, three-year-olds could indeed reproduce a bit of his splatter technique, but could they turn it into a magnificently absorbing mural-sized painting? Stand in front of one of Pollock’s works, in which the slashes of paint — dripped, poured and lashed across the canvas — form a dense but lyrical tangle, surging with rhythm and energy, so that you almost feel you’re about to get lost in a mysterious, dark forest. Then tell me your three-year-old could have done it.Pollock didn’t start his painting career with the splatter-works for which he is most famous. The movie shows how those works developed out of his interest in surrealism, his roots in the stylised realism of Thomas Hart Benton, and his use of the abstract expressionists’ expanded gesture. As visual reference alone, it is an eye-opener for those who don’t know this stuff. But it’s also remarkable in the way it avoids the clichés of the artist in creative flight. There is none of the twitchy jabbering foisted upon poor Van Gogh in Lust for Life, or the squinty thoughtfulness of Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf writing a novel in The Hours. Instead, in a series of short but telling scenes, we see Pollock’s life and art intertwine: how Krasner took him under her wing in the early 1940s, providing stability and encouragement, how she sold him to the critics and to rich collectors like the eccentric Peggy Guggenheim (a lovely, edgy cameo from Amy Madigan), while managing to keep his drinking under control. Then, of course, fame achieved, Pollock began to slip again, and the fatal car accident looms on the horizon.Harris is entirely convincing as Pollock — taciturn, bullishly creative, self-absorbed, selfish, boorish, but also desperately insecure. Balding, stocky Harris even looks a lot like Pollock. That we feel for Pollock — even as we see how detestable he was — is a mark of Harris’s talent. Harden is simply excellent as Krasner, beautiful, intelligent and steely. The other, smaller roles are well done too, especially Jeffrey Tambor as Clement Greenberg, the critic who championed Pollock, which turned out to be a rather thankless task. Unfortunately, Willem de Kooning, an artist whose work is often more interesting than Pollock’s but whose life is less so, gets rather short-changed, both by the glossing over of his relationship with and influence on Pollock, and by the role, small though it is, having been given to the preposterous Val Kilmer. There are small things one can quibble about: why, on the soundtrack while Pollock is painting, do we hear a trite sub-classical tune? Surely some driving bebop, perhaps Pollock’s favoured drummer Gene Krupa, would have been better? As a whole, though, Pollock is one of the best movies about a visual artist I’ve seen. It’s up there with Love Is the Devil, John Maybury’s brilliant, disturbing film about Francis Bacon, and that’s saying something.