The way he was
Sydney Pollack was one of the most celebrated filmmakers of the 1970s. His conspiracy-minded movies never stopped questioning authority. He was the mastermind behind the classics that made you think
STEPHEN COLE
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
May 28, 2008 at 12:00 AM EDT
Director-actor-producer Sydney Pollack, who died on Monday in Los Angeles, will be remembered as one of Hollywood's most dependable and interesting 1970s filmmakers. In truth, he never stopped making 1970s-style films.
His signature movie from that decade – Three Days of the Condor (1975) – is a classic liberal paranoia film. Renegade Central Intelligence Agency agents wipe out a New York division of the firm, just missing operative Joe Turner (Robert Redford), who comes back after “them.”
But even Pollack's most popular movie from the seventies, The Way We Were (1973), thought of at the time as a marzipan love story between Redford and Barbra Streisand, is an uneasy meditation on McCarthyism, with beautiful, bland Redford embodying the silent, complacent American majority.
“Maybe you were born committed,” Redford's character, screenwriter Hubbell Gardner, says upon leaving his Marxist rebel lover, Katie Morosky (Streisand). “I can't get negative enough. I can't get angry enough.”
Yes, anger and a burrowing suspicion of institutional authority were defining characteristics of American movies in the era of Watergate and Vietnam. (Think of All the President's Men, Klute, Chinatown and The Parallax View.) Pollack, though, never lost his skepticism about the all-powerful industries of law and government.
It is fitting, then, that the last film he developed, Recount, is a scathing HBO denunciation of the 2000 Bush-Gore election (it is currently showing in Canada on the pay networks TMN and Movie Central). Pollack was to direct the drama, starring Kevin Spacey, but withdrew because of failing health.
Before that, he co-produced and starred in Michael Clayton, a legal thriller every bit as anxious and conspiracy-minded as Three Days of the Condor.
A professional alarmist, Pollack enjoyed a valuable TV apprenticeship, making episodes of The Fugitive and Alfred Hitchcock Presents in the mid-sixties. Upon becoming a feature-film director, he was inevitably drawn to deception and danger.
Even the effervescent comedy Tootsie (1982) is the story of a failed actor (Dustin Hoffman) who takes refuge in a female role. Elsewhere, the filmmaker sought out menacing conspirators in the United Nations ( The Interpreter, 2005, starring Nicole Kidman) and courtly Southern legal institutions ( The Firm, 1993).
Pollack came about his doggedness naturally. His father, a Russian-Jewish immigrant, was a semi-professional boxer. The Indiana-born, New York-trained artist, who once danced with Martha Graham, made his essential professional contact in 1962, acting on the underrated Korean war drama War Hunt. There, he met and became intrigued by fellow actor Redford. (Future filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola was a gofer on the shoot.) Pollack and Redford would go on to become friends while making seven films together: This Property is Condemned, Jeremiah Johnson, The Way We Were, Three Days of the Condor, The Electric Horseman, Out of Africa and Havana.
Pollack saw America in Redford. And the blond star would always play a variation on the same character for Pollack: the uncertain, all-American hero for whom “everything was too easy” – a line from The Way We Were that Redford liked so much he used it again in his film Quiz Show. “[Robert Redford] has been particularly interesting to me because of his complexity,” Pollack once explained to British journalist Geoffrey Macnab. “He has this golden-boy exterior, but there's something very dark which comes out in his performances.”
Few filmmakers enjoy a career that lasts into their 70s. Pollack, who died from cancer at the age of 73 with a full slate of projects on the go, was the exception. He was lucky enough to have a sustaining, endlessly fascinating theme: the dangerous business that is America. He was also a born collaborator who produced or co-produced close to 50 films – projects as diverse as The Fabulous Baker Boys, Heaven and The Talented Mr. Ripley, There was more: Pollack was a fast, funny actor who brought a grainy authenticity to the screen, usually playing businessmen who enjoy getting their way. Tilda Swinton won an Academy Award for Michael Clayton, but Pollack delivered a more knowing and subtle performance. His Marty Bach, the affable, pragmatic, wholly corrupt senior partner of George Clooney's wayward law firm, was the beating heart of the film. Asked why he interrupted his own filmmaking career to act for Stanley Kubrick ( Eyes Wide Shut) and Woody Allen ( Husbands and Wives), Pollack replied, “Because I wanted to see how they work. I was curious.”
That curiosity helped make Sydney Pollack a director who mattered. If nothing else, he noticed that The Way We Were in 1973 wasn't much different from The Way We Are Now.
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