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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
Sydney Pollack directed Dustin Hoffman romping around in a skirt. Now he's co-starring as the orgy master who guides Tom Cruise through the debaucherous center of Stanley Kubrick's final film.
Jul 15, 1999 | Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman are the stars of "Eyes Wide Shut," but Sydney Pollack plays the crucial role. As Richard Schickel put it in Time, Pollack is the mysterious high-roller "who ties together all the evil that Cruise's character discovers." Coming aboard in the middle of filming to replace Harvey Keitel, Pollack says he had "the idea of being tougher with the character of Tom." But Kubrick disagreed. As Pollack later told Peter Bogdanovich, "Stanley had an idea of my wanting to manipulate him more and be kinder."
Kubrick's hunch sounds good because it suits Pollack's onscreen aura. Behind the camera, Pollack is known for directing big stars in box-office sensations, like Dustin Hoffman in "Tootsie" and Cruise in "The Firm." In front of the camera, he projects a mensch-like presence that gladdens you even when he's temporarily a jerk. Like all great character actors, he challenges and magnetizes top-billed performers without overpowering them.
But no actor could supply what Kubrick asks Pollack to deliver in "Eyes Wide Shut." Pollack's part consists of two bookend sequences; with them Pollack is supposed to give a realistic spine to a bland nightmare narrative. Yet how can you provide a spine when the rest of the movie sags like a hammock? Pollack is masterful in his first scene, welcoming Cruise and Kidman to his luxurious annual Christmas bash. In the middle of this party, he summons Cruise, a doctor, into his private quarters, where a voluptuous junkie whom Pollack is shtupping has OD'd. When Cruise counsels him to keep her where she is for an hour, Pollack's beaming bonhomie dissolves to reveal, not anguish or panic, but the clock-watching attentiveness of a man with a lot on his mind. He puffs out his lower lip, makes a soft sound of frustration and assent -- and is instantly believable as an astute Manhattan power broker.
Unfortunately, Pollack reappears only after Cruise goes through a spacey odyssey that climaxes in a ritualized, peculiarly unerotic masked orgy. (It's as if the spirit of Rudy Giuliani's New York had somehow infected Kubrick even while he was sequestered in his English digs.) And the ensuing confrontation with Cruise is thuddingly expository, with Kubrick slowing the place to glacial speed and Pollack manfully trying to juice up every piece of godfatherly advice. Although you wish Pollack could cut loose, you also admire his authority -- something he has displayed in movies from the get-go.
In his only screen role before "Tootsie" (1982), Pollack played a sergeant in Korea in the 1962 anti-war film "War Hunt." From a cast studded with such talented unknowns as Robert Redford (a private) and Tom Skerritt (a corporal), Pollack stood out for the casual authority with which he commanded most of his men and the screen. (The one man the sergeant can't control is a psycho played by teen idol John Saxon, who wriggles special privileges from the brass because he's an exceptional scout and killer.) Pollack was still in his mid-20s, but he was persuasive as a modest career soldier (he calls himself a "20-year man") with a wife and kid back home. He gave the sergeant a rooted decency that colored the man's military compromise.
The warmth and sagacity Pollack showed then may be essential to his personality. In 1983, I interviewed him about the relay-race writing process behind "Tootsie" for an article on Hollywood ghostwriters in Film Comment. He sent me a note to thank me for the article's accuracy, and to say that, "given the possibility for character assassination inherent in these pieces," he felt he "got off lucky" -- despite the editors laying out his picture under a quote from William Goldman dubbing him a "writer-fucker."
