Sydney Pollack’s name could be attached to any definition of “actor’s director” you could whip up. An actor himself, he never failed to produce movies with interesting performances, setting the stage for players as diverse as Bill Murray and Willie Nelson, Robert Redford and Jessica Lange to do their very best work.
The Oscar-winning director and sometime actor (and sometime actor-director) died of cancer Monday. He was 73.
He directed films which produced 12 Oscar-nominated performances, from “Tootsie” to “Out of Africa,” “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They” and “The Electric Horseman.” His “Jeremiah Johnson” is one of my favorite memories from childhood, a guilty pleasure I watch any time I stumble across it on TV.
As an actor, he all but stole “Tootsie” from Dustin Hoffman, the very manifestation of the long-suffering, not-gonna-take-it-any-more agent working with an “artistise.”
He studied acting himself under such a pure spirit, Sanford Meisner. I’d compare Pollack to Martin Ritt, another actor’s director of solid, emotional entertainments, albeit one with a stronger moral code in his pictures.
Pollack acted for Woody Allen, and produced and took a pivotal role in last fall’s “Michael Clayton.” His last screen performance can be viewed in theaters now: He’s funny and effective as the serial-marrying dad to Patrick Dempsey’s womanizing son in “Made of Honor.” I remember him in the French “Avenue Montaigne” from a year or two back. He was an effective villain for Kubrick (“Eyes Wide Shut”) and Tony Gilroy (in “Michael Clayton”), a wonderful comic foil for Dustin Hoffman.
The last film he directed was “Sketches of Frank Gehry,” a documentary about the architect. His last feature was “The Interpreter.”
I think the first time I ever read the phrase “middlebrow” was in a Pauline Kael review of one of Pollack’s popular 1980s films, when he did “Absence of Malice” (about newspapering and libel), “Tootsie,” “Out of Africa” and “Havana.” That’s a pretty good knock against him. He didn’t do movies that pushed the envelope, that spoke to some higher calling. He made terrific star-driven entertainments, and did it as well as anybody. The Variety obit makes a case for the liberalism that runs through his films. It’s there in some, but utterly absent in the big payday pictures.
He was much honored in his later years, as a defender of artist’s rights, as a consummate craftsman, as the great actor’s director that he was.
His run of hits ended with “The Firm” (1993) and “Sabrina” (1995). From “Three Days of the Condor” to “The Firm,” his best pictures are as watchable today as when they hit theaters.
And middlebrow or not, he kept his hand in, producing not only “Michael Clayton” but George Clooney’s latest, “Leatherheads.”
His best movies? “Tootsie,” “The Firm,” “The Electric Horseman,” “Three Days of the Condor” and maybe “Absence of Malice.” The earlier stuff is dated (he came from TV, and his movies rarely looked like epics – even “Out of Africa” was an unattractive, grainy, dull looking epic romance) and the later films didn’t work. I can’t bear “The Way We Were,” though many consider it his crowning achievement.
Pollack was at his best working with the biggest stars, challenging Redford (never the greatest actor), Streisand, Fonda, Sally Field, Tom Cruise, Harrison Ford, Nicole Kidman and others, at the peak of their fame and earning power, in solid, generally entertaining pictures.
We’d heard illness was why he pulled out of the chance to finish with a flourish, directing the HBO film “Recount.” But his name pulled it together and got that film onto TV.
Well done.
