The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (330 page)

Similarly,
Jeremiah Johnson
is a meticulous landscape picture that fails to convey the mythic nature of its subject and reveals how complacent an actor Redford had become.
The Way We Were
never overcomes the implausibility of Streisand and Redford loving each other, but it had a strange chemistry that made for a big hit.
Three Days of the Condor
is a tortuous spy film, heavy with stars but unnecessary and unconvinced, despite a script that proposed unexpected aspects of Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway—in the first instance, so unexpected that the part might have been entrusted to someone else.
Bobby Deerfield
came as a genuine surprise, a film about death that never lets motor racing or pretty European scenery soften its point. It uses Al Pacino and Marthe Keller remarkably well to illustrate different degrees of intensity—the one ingrowing and the other flamboyant and generous—and it achieved a depth that had hitherto eluded Pollack.

Tootsie
and
Out of Africa
were big pictures, heavy with praise and awards
—Out of Africa
won best picture. Yet they were both the work of a good producer rather than a director with character.

With
Havana
, not even the producer’s touch remained. But Pollack seemed aware of his own inclination, and he became an active impresario for other people’s films:
Honeysuckle Rose
(80, Jerry Schatzberg);
Bright Lights, Big City
(88, James Bridges); the excellent
The Fabulous Baker Boys
(89, Steve Kloves);
Presumed Innocent
(90, Alan J. Pakula); and
White Palace
(90, Luis Mandoki).

He is also a nice, comic actor, as witness his agent in
Tootsie, Death Becomes Her
(92, Robert Zemeckis), his splendidly fluent self-deceiver in
Husbands and Wives
(93, Woody Allen), his attempt to make sense of
Eyes Wide Shut
(99, Stanley Kubrick), and his friend to everyone in
Michael Clayton
(07, Tony Gilroy).

The Firm
was long, unduly elaborate, and—in the end—heavy with a feeling of so what? But it worked on screen as one watched, and if one gives Pollack general credit for making that happen, it is a way of noting how few others have that knack today. His sheer professionalism is endearing, but
Sabrina
and
Random Hearts
were so awful their polish seemed absurd. And
The Interpreter
was a bad film. The Gehry documentary was a labor of schmooze.

He turns more and more to production, through his company, Mirage:
The Talented Mr. Ripley
(99, Anthony Minghella);
Birthday Girl
(01, Jez Butterworth);
Iris
(01, Richard Eyre);
Heaven
(02, Tom Tykwer);
The Quiet American
(02, Phillip Noyce);
Cold Mountain
(03, Minghella);
The Reader
(08, Stephen Daldry).

Sarah Polley
, b. Toronto, Canada, 1979
1999:
The Best Day of My Life
(s);
Don’t Think Twice
(s). 2001:
I Shout Love
(s). 2002:
All I Want for Christmas
. 2004: “The Harp,” an episode from
The Shields Stories
. 2006:
Away from Her
.

Of all the entries that are new for the fifth edition of this book, none is more deserving than this one. If Sarah Polley is involved with a project, pay attention. No, I don’t mean that at the age of thirty she has made it into some territory for untouchables where she cannot do a thing wrong. It’s exactly to the point to say—as she would, I think—that she takes risks with difficult material and rare talent, and risk is just hollow rhetoric if it leaves no room for failure. Sarah Polley is earnest in many things, including left-wing politics and her feeling that true independent movies are always going to be contributing to that cause. As an actress, she might have been a “star” long ago but for her resolve to stay Canadian and the way she trusts a quiet, withdrawn inner flame in most of her characters. She does not play showoffs, or seem to believe in them. She has turned down career-making ventures—like
Almost Famous
—so it is vital to note what an extraordinary career she has had already.

The daughter of two actors (her mother died when Sarah was eleven), Polley was a child actress:
One Magic Christmas
(85, Phillip Borsos);
Confidential
(86, Bruce Pittman); doing Margaret Atwood material in
Heaven on Earth
(87, Allan Kroeke);
Prettykill
(87, George Kaczender);
Blue Monkey
(87, William Fruet); and as the lead in the Canadian TV series
Ramona
. She was in
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
(87, Terry Gilliam); in
Lantern Hill
(90, Kevin Sullivan); and then in the TV series
Road to Avonlea
(90–6), which left her well-off before adulthood.

As a young adult, her depth was signaled playing the girl who survives the accident but in a crippled state, so that all her dreams are endangered in
The Sweet Hereafter
(97, Atom Egoyan). And from then on, her choice of material has been personal and bold:
The Hanging Garden
(97, Thom Fitzgerald);
Jerry and Tom
(98, Saul Rubinek);
White Lies
(98, Kari Skogland);
Last Night
(88, Don McKellar); catching attention as the girl being photographed in
Guinevere
(99, Audrey Wells);
eXistenZ
(99, David Cronenberg);
Go
(99, Doug Liman);
The Life Before This
(99, Jerry Ciccorriti); in a short,
This Might Be Good
(00, Patricia Rozema);
Love Come Down
(00, Clement Vigo);
The Weight of Water
(00, Kathryn Bigelow);
The Law of Enclosures
(00, John Greyson);
The Claim
(00, Michael Winterbottom).

No Such Thing
(01, Hal Hartley) was a setback, but she was working so hard that it was hardly felt:
The I Inside
(03, Roland Suso Richter);
The Event
(03, Fitzgerald); and then
My Life Without Me
(03, Isabel Coixet), about a young woman who learns she has cancer;
Dermott’s Quest
(03, Grimur Ardal);
Luck
(03, Peter Wellington); and then, in a departure, as one of the besieged people in
Dawn of the Dead
(04, Zack Snyder).

She was in
Slings and Arrows
(03), on TV;
Sugar
(04, John Palmer);
Siblings
(04, David Weaver); doing her best in
Don’t Come Knocking
(05, Wim Wenders); and working with Coixet again in
The Secret Life of Words
(05), a masterpiece in which she is a disturbed young woman who goes to look after burn victims and meets Tim Robbins.
Beowulf & Grendel
(05, Sturla Gun-narson), done in Iceland; and outstanding as the daughter Abigail in the TV series
John Adams
(08, Tom Hooper);
Splice
(10, Vincenzo Natali).

In summary, the actress has delivered three or four great performances while helping to sustain a couple of dozen marginal ventures. And all by the age of thirty. But that is not all. She is a director, too, and
Away from Her
is one of the best modern films about the awkward realities (and epiphanies) from life that mainstream cinema has deserted. In its central performance—by Julie Christie—Sarah Polley has shown us that certain characterizations in fiction may be as far-reaching as explorations into space, higher mathematics, or the genome project. She showed us something we had never seen before, and she made it part of our culture—alarming, “mad” if you will, but commonplace.

Abraham Polonsky
(1910–99), b. New York
1948:
Force of Evil
. 1969:
Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here
. 1971:
Romance of a Horse Thief
.

Twenty-one years between first and second films is longer than any director should have to wait. The case of Polonsky is one of the most dismal hangovers from the McCarthy period. Long after Carl Foreman and Losey had been rehabilitated, Polonsky stayed out in the cold, working under assumed names so that the actual list of his writing credits is unclear. Polonsky was possibly the most creative personality in Enterprise Films. He scripted
Body and Soul
(47, Robert Rossen) and may have had as much influence on it as the director. The following year he made
Force of Evil
for MGM, a B thriller, starring John Garfield, that employs crisp, blank-verse dialogue without preciosity and lifts the urban thriller to a magnificent allegory of corrupt ambition. He scripted
Golden Earrings
(47, Mitchell Leisen) and
I Can Get It for You Wholesale
(51, Michael Gordon) and was then blacklisted.

His first new credit, under his own name, was as scriptwriter on
Madigan
(68, Don Siegel). In the same year, he directed
Willie Boy
, the story of a rogue Indian tracked down by a callous society, too painfully applicable to Polonsky’s own history, and as visually rusty as one might expect from a man so long out of action. Polonsky’s third film is a story set on the Polish border in the year 1904, and goes back to the director’s ethnic roots.

He said that it was part of his life—both as European refugee, and as young immigrant in New York devouring fiction: “In this strange way
Romance of a Horse Thief
is attached closely to the films of my childhood long before I had heard of fine art. For me, movies are irrevocably and richly rooted in kitsch, in childhood, in storytelling, in the rubbish of paperbacks and sitting under the streetlights while off in the zoo across the lots flowering with burdock, lions roared out their fantasy of freedom.… It was a great pleasure to make a movie again. Nothing is better; perhaps revolution, but there you have to succeed and be right, dangers which never attach themselves to making movies, and dreaming.”

Many of the simple facts of his life are obscure. But it seems that, among other occupations, he had been a teacher at City College, New York, in the 1930s, a soldier, a writer for radio, and the author of at least three novels
—The Discoverers, The World Above
, and
The Season of Fear
. There are greater tragedies in the world, but if you ever feel comfortable, search out
Force of Evil
and recollect how thoroughly its director was excluded from filmmaking.

More recently, he wrote the screenplay for
Avalanche Express
(78, Mark Robson). He also wrote the early drafts of the script that became
Guilty By Suspicion
(91, Irwin Winkler)—a project that had Bertrand Tavernier as its director when Polonsky was involved.

Gillo Pontecorvo
(Gilberto Pontecorvo) (1919–2006), b. Pisa, Italy
1956: “Giovanna,” episode from
Die Vind Rose
. 1957:
La Grande Strada Azzurra
. 1959:
Kapo
. 1965:
La Battaglia di Algeri/The Battle of Algiers
. 1968:
Queimada!
. 1979:
Operazione Ogro
. 1984:
L’Addio a Enrico Berlinguer
(d). 1997: “Nostalgia di Protezione,” an episode from
I Corti Italiani
.

In
The Meaning of Treason
, Rebecca West claims that it was the revelation that Bruno Pontecorvo’s younger brother, Gilberto, had been a Communist since 1939 that first brought the Harwell physicist under suspicion. As she dryly pointed out, it was a substantial connection for five screenings to miss, since Gillo Pontecorvo was an active journalist for the party. Whether Gillo subverted or illuminated his brother, the notorious influence may have been too difficult to live down.

But Gillo’s films contradict the idea of a proselytizing, doctrinaire man. After the war, he spent several years as assistant to Yves Allégret and Mario Monicelli, and in the early 1960s he made a number of unsung documentaries. His feature debut was in East Germany, on an episode of the women’s rights movie presided over by Joris Ivens and Cavalcanti. Something of Ivens’s flexible decency seems to have touched Pontecorvo. His first features were clumsy infusions of large subjects and melodrama, especially
Kapo
, a concentration camp story. But six years later, still lacking facility, Pontecorvo made a fascinating commentary upon documentary,
The Battle of Algiers
, shot in actual locations and with actors and real-life participants. The French government impeded the release of the film, but it is far less hostile to them than it might have been. Pontecorvo makes many French soldiers and colonists credible and sympathetic figures, caught up in a larger, politico-economic pattern of exploitation. In short, it is the more politically convincing because it does not manipulate its people.
Queimada!
is a more generalized picture, about slavery and sugar in the Caribbean. But it too insists on seeing the imperialists as victims of their own system, and it is enormously helped by Marlon Brando’s performance as the disillusioned English adventurer.

Natalie Portman
(Hershlag), b. Jerusalem, Israel, 1981
Natalie Portman has had her great moments. She is honey to still photographers. And
People
magazine has said she is one of the fifty most beautiful people alive. With looks that match a Middle Eastern father and a mother from Ohio, she is a natural exotic, and one might have thought that her three shots as Padmé Amidala in the
Star Wars
series would have secured her place in film history. But, truth to tell, that was a very dull little queen, and Ms. Portman was left looking neglected. She does publicity with nothing short of brilliance, but Natalie Portman is nowhere near the actress we have in Anna Paquin (who is a year younger).