26 June 2008
A month without Sydney Pollack (1934-2008)
)Published on June 26th, 2008 @ 10:03:53 pm, using 1942 words, 2155 views
“Sydney made the world a little better, movies a little better and even dinner a little better. A tip of the hat to a class act,” George Clooney said in a statement from his publicist.
“He’ll be missed terribly,” Clooney said.
I read that on MSN nearly a month ago today as I learned of Sydney Pollack’s passing and… strangely, I came to agree… having never had the pleasure of his company for dinner…
Mysteriously, that sentiment made sense on a very personal level.
From where I stand.
Worlds away.
And in a way, that making sense made sense.
Sydney Pollack was my favorite Charlie Rose interview… my favorite Charlie Rose conversation, really… which in the end, though voyeuristic and vicarious to the spectator, still feels like an exchange of some sort. You don’t get to be heard, but you do get to listen and you get to agree or disagree.
I agreed with a lot.
I can think of a number of things he said that I’d like to have said myself or been able to say as well. He came across as incisive and personable on that small screen, at that wooden table, against that black background, during those intimately public 60 minutes.
And admirably capable behind a camera.
He was one of the few directors whose DVD commentaries I looked forward to.
Recently I rented Sketches of Frank Gehry simply because his name was attached to it, not being much for documentaries. The prospect of watching Sydney Pollack engage in conversation was always as enticing as watching a film of his.
There’s often so little to be said in this day and age, or rather not enough worth listening to… so much icing on so little cake… And in contrast so much to the stories he hand picked to tell. Maybe not to the stories themselves but there was certainly a great deal to his interpretation of them. That’s what got me, I guess. The fact that he managed to infuse what was there with an insightful take and layer everything in such a way as to defuse clichés. That ability made it possible for him to work on mainstream films and always make sure there was more substance to them than we might expect.
There was always something beyond plot and genre. There was a nest or recess, a nook or cranny inside any story he told (whether that be a scene, a motivation, a character) where I always found myself feeling… not alone. There was always something that made it both more human and more intimate than it proposed or claimed to be.
There was The Firm. A John Grisham thriller, the first of many. The first of many conspiracies, the first of many law-practicing characters and in their midst… there was Abby McDeere. I have no way of knowing if the Abby in the book was as compelling as the one on the screen, having never read a Grisham novel. But here was Jeanne Tripplehorn in a wife role which could’ve proven thankless that somehow got molded by Pollack’s hands into the center of everything, the reason behind everything, the voice of conscience and truth, a weight of stability which keeps the story and its thrills meaningful and relevant.
There was The Interpreter. One of his last. A pretty straightforward Hollywood thriller carrying the label of ‘first film shot at the U.N.’ And just below the surface, two wounded souls becoming one another’s comfort, gradually redirecting each other towards love. Being for one another the narrow dirt road that opens up unexpectedly in the aftermath of grief and makes a destination possible again. The kind of road which, once you get to the end of and look back, you’ll find it’s erased itself behind you. Its only purpose having been to get you there, to make your breakthrough a possibility.
‘Arias’ he called them, the five long dialogue scenes, between Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn. Respite from the twists and turns of a conventional thriller. Five scattered ‘confrontations between [two] souls’ (to quote Wiley Wiggins of Waking Life). Watch that scene here.
There’s nothing quite as stunning to me cinematically speaking than two characters talking their hearts out. Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, the subway scene in Keith Gordon’s Waking the dead, the five arias in Pollack’s own The Interpreter…
Subway Scene (Waking the dead)
What is conversation if not the means through which mutual revelation, discovery and sometimes adaptation work on you to shift your focus - from slightly to completely - to open a door or close a window… or leave one of them ajar… to zoom in and out. Something always kindles as a result of that reshaping of your bit of world at hand. He seemed to have a deep appreciation of those results, the human connections sparked by conversation. He seemed to trust the power of conversation, to not fear the slowness that conversation requires, and to relish the pauses.
Silvia Broome: You never know who you’re gonna meet, do you?
Tobin Keller: No.
It’ll always mean the world to me - to have been able to find that line somewhere cradled between pauses.
There was also Sabrina. The remake. That dreaded word. The one that tanked. The one that was branded a flop. There is something about it that’s always appealed to me more than the original in spite of Audrey Hepburn. It perfectly exemplified to me the patient rhythm that was so characteristic of Pollack. That quality that always managed to draw me in and evade most.
Pollack’s Sabrina had a layer of quiet strength to her. A spot of inherent sadness that followed its course getting nursed in the process to become that quiet strength. That one aspect for once managed to overshadow the luminosity that was Audrey Hepburn.
Pollack’s doing.
Linus Larrabee: So, that really is a beautiful name. How did you get it?
Sabrina: My father’s reading. It’s in a poem.
Linus Larrabee: Oh?
Sabrina: “Sabrina fair, listen where thou art sitting under the glassy, cool, translucent wave, in twisted braids of lilies knitting the loose train of thy amber-dropping hair.”
Sabrina: [laughs to herself] It’s an incredible airplane - it’s beautiful. I’ve never seen anything like it.
Linus Larrabee: Ah, yes.
[returns to reading his work papers]
Sabrina: Don’t you ever look out the window?
Linus Larrabee: When do I have time?
Sabrina: What happened to all that time we saved taking the helicopter?
Linus Larrabee: [lightheartedly] I’m storing it up.
Sabrina: [seriously] No, you’re not.
Linus Larrabee: [pause] So, your little poem - what does it mean?
Sabrina: It’s the story of a water sprite who saved a virgin from a fate worse than death.
Linus Larrabee: And Sabrina’s the virgin.
Sabrina: [quietly] Sabrina’s the savior.
(Sabrina - from IMDB)
I also felt compelled to pick up Random Hearts again. Having remembered its lackluster reception and performance at the box office, I was seized by a sudden urge to take a fresh look at it. And there it was. That quiet slowness again. A lovely gradual building towards moments that sneak up on you with the force of the small and meaningful revelations exchanged as people converse. Nothing major to boggle the senses, rarely something to leave you awestruck, but instead layer upon layer of insight into the human condition, pockets of truth in which to place your hands and feel comfortable - the feeling of sitting by a pool and placing your legs into the water to find warmth. I think Mr. Pollack himself had an inkling as to why it didn’t appeal to most people. That very slowness to which the world is increasingly showing resistance.
To me, his failures were worthy of the utmost pride and respect.
I read once in the L.A. Weekly the following sentence referring to The Dreamlife of Angels, a film I cherish:
If you had to, you could say there are two kinds of movies: those in a hurry to give life to stories and those that wait patiently for stories to emerge from life.
Sydney Pollack once gave an interview that clearly reveals an appreciation of slowness, of movies that are not in a hurry to give life to stories, but simply emerge from it:
Charlie Rose: What has been the most dramatic and consequential change in the movie business since you’ve been in it? Over the last 10-15 years?
Sydney Pollack: I think it’s a combination of three factors. One is that studios are now all small divisions of multinational corporations, which are used to repeatable products. They’re used to increasing volume by marketing, not increasing volume by making a better product necessarily. I don’t mean to be critical here, I’m just saying, once a recipe is found everything is a question of keeping it the same and broadening the marketing basis. A generation of moviegoers who’ve come to maturity in a different way than we all did. In the 70’s and even early 80’s, college kids on weekends went to see foreign movies. Nobody goes to see foreign movies now.
Charlie Rose: Why is that?
Sydney Pollack: They’re not interested. They’re just not interested.
Charlie Rose: Because they’re distracted by other things, foreign movies are not as good or…?
Sydney Pollack: Foreign movies are told in a way that’s contrary to the sort of cultural influence that they’ve grown up on. These are multi-tasking mosaic-oriented kids who grew up with earphones on, doing homework, watching television without the sound. So you have a picture going with no sound, homework questions and loud rock music in your ears, so… I watch my kids do this, I say, you know… You take those kids, you put them in a story that says ‘Once upon a time there was a castle…’ It’s hard. They wanna get to the gun quickly. They wanna get to the undressing quickly. They wanna get to the most sensate part of it. I don’t wanna say sensationalistic, that sounds like I’m knocking it. I don’t mean to knock it. It’s a whole different way of storytelling.
Charlie Rose: Do you feel old fashioned?
Sydney Pollack: Yeah. I feel a little old fashioned. I do. I mean, it’s a little like liking Tabasco sauce so much that you can’t eat something without Tabasco sauce. These are kids that want Tabasco sauce on their food. What that does… it does something, gives you a sensation, also dulls your taste buds, so that when you don’t have Tabasco sauce, there’s not a lot to taste. And every once in a while there’s an exception to that rule, you know, you can make a breakthrough picture that still has that kind of classical storyelling elements to it. But this is a tough generation to capture, it’s tough to get their attention, they have a very short attention span, they’re used to… When I say multi-tasking, it’s a computer world, I mean the computers can do five programs at once and these kids can keep up with them.
Charlie Rose: So they like things like…
Sydney Pollack: (snaps fingers) Let’s get to the point. Ok, where’s the gun? All right, all right, get to the sex scene.
Click here to watch the Charlie Rose interview.
Selected Filmography:
- Three Days of the Condor (1975)
- Tootsie (1982)
- Out of Africa (1985)
- The Firm (1993)
- Sabrina (1995)
- Random Hearts (1999)
- The Interpreter (2005)
- Sketches of Frank Gehry (2005)
This post is the creative work of Iris Watts Hirideyo and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Sydney Pollack, The Interpreter, George Clooney, MSN, Charlie Rose, conversation, interview, The Firm, Sabrina, Frank Gehry, movies, kinds
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