From "Tootsie" to "Eyes Wide Shut"

With "Eyes Wide Shut," Pollack completes a trilogy of performances with notoriously challenging stars and star directors. In "Tootsie," in addition to directing, Pollack played the agent of the ultimate New York actor, Michael Dorsey -- a role that took Dustin Hoffman's own dedication and combativeness to self-destructive extremes. In "Husbands and Wives," Pollack was the sane best friend to the neurotic persona of New York's most prolific and idiosyncratic writer-director (and star), Woody Allen. His association with "Eyes Wide Shut" began when he supplied Kubrick, that legendary New York expatriate perfectionist, with Cruise and Kidman's fax numbers. Then Kubrick called on him for a part that Kubrick's cowriter, Fredric Raphael, considered critical: an orgy master who also functions as "protective, castrating father" to Tom Cruise's character.

It's as if Pollack has become a specialist at humanizing men whose work process consumes them and whose vision tends to be solipsistic.

In "Tootsie," Pollack's portrait of an agent, George Fields, could have been crass and undercutting. After all, Michael Dorsey (Hoffman), George's most difficult client, is a thespian dreamer who's been waiting tables between acting jobs for years. When Michael demands to know why George didn't push him for a production of "The Iceman Cometh," George tells him that Michael Dorsey is a "name" only "when you want to send back a steak."

But Pollack goes on to transform their battles into virtuoso duets of show-biz digs, weighted almost equally in argument and sympathy. Pollack's George is a man of the world -- from his perspective, Michael's integrity is both noble and blind. George knows he's being insensitive when he says he wouldn't want Michael to give up "his standing as a cult failure," but he's right to reject Michael's request to help raise money for a play called "Return to Love Canal." As George asks, "Who gives a shit? Nobody wants to pay $20 to watch people living next to chemical waste. They can see that in New Jersey." Each of their scenes together is a classic, because Pollack doesn't give an inch. Hoffman imbues Michael with righteous outrage, but Pollack reacts with the sureness of someone who refuses to have his intelligence insulted.

As deliriously enjoyable as almost all of "Tootsie" is, it's a relief whenever Pollack's trim, forward-pushing George barks or strides into the picture. He always seems to be in "mission mode." The theater folk and soap folk are so absorbed in their own emotions or sensations, ambitions or jealousies, that a fellow who communicates directly is a welcome interloper. George's energy animates his whole body, to the edges of his wiry hair.

And that energy is friendly -- it even makes Michael more likable. George gives Michael pause when he asks why Michael is hurting him; after all, George never attacks Michael's ability or gifts, only his mulish arrogance. One of George's funniest moments comes when he tries to follow the romantic complications that have developed because Michael posed as a woman. George simply can't keep up. It takes a fellow as driven as Michael to come up with the myriad pluses and minuses of this charade -- and an actor as fervent as Hoffman to catalyze "Tootsie."

In the running commentary he provides to the laser disc of "Tootsie," Pollack says that doing his own close-ups was easy. Yet whenever he was in a scene with the star of the film, Pollack found himself doing what any other director would do -- zeroing in on Hoffman. This focus pays off: George is locked in a perpetual struggle to grasp the roots of Michael's nonstop delirium.

A portrait of Pollack as George belongs in a dictionary of catch phrases next to "I can't get my mind around that" -- the phrase pops up more than once in "Husbands and Wives." It's what Woody Allen, as Columbia creative writing teacher Gabe, says when he berates Pollack's Jack for leaving his hyper-cerebral wife (Judy Davis) and moving in with a bouncy, pretty aerobics instructor (Lysette Anthony). The result is a primal friendship scene, with Gabe trying to persuade Jack that he knows what's good for his buddy and Jack drawing the line at Gabe's vicious critique of his girlfriend. Jack makes clear that Gabe has no concept of how edgy his married life had become. He refuses to let Jack condescend to his new woman simply because she's an aerobics instructor.

There's no question that Jack gets the better of the argument, at least as far as the audience goes. That's partly because of Pollack's enormous vitality in the role. Jack is a recognizable type. He's a smart professional man who enjoys sparring with his cultured urban friends but also likes sports and watching dumb comedies on video -- and at this point in his life, he wants to be able to relax. Pollack extracts every ounce of complexity from this type, until he becomes an archetype -- almost an ideal. He tries to get Gabe to see that he can separate from his wife without denying his love and admiration for her. The way Jack vows respect and fondness to his ex, the emotions are real, not willed or dutiful. But what Jack gets from his new relationship is real, too: physicality and spontaneity. When Jack tells Gabe to stop talking like his rabbi, you feel like applauding.

Unfortunately, in order for Allen the writer-director to prove that Allen the persona knows the score, the aerobics instructor ultimately comes off as an astrology-fixated airhead who can't keep her mouth shut in intellectual company. Apparently, in the Allen universe, that disqualifies her from mating with any self-respecting person. "Husband and Wives" becomes Allen's dubious testament to his own ravaged romantic wisdom. But Pollack and Judy Davis pull you close to their marital ups and downs -- they make you feel the residual commitment and hunger for companionship that bring them back together.

Pollack is too shrewd a director himself not to have recognized what he was getting into with "Eyes Wide Shut." I assume he signed up mostly to help out an admired fellow director -- something I've seen him do before. Six years ago, I bumped into Pollack before a screening of someone else's troubled cable movie. Though embroiled in a brutally short editing period for "The Firm," he was there to lend support to the other besieged director. Pollack was alarmingly upfront with his doubts about whether he had made sense out of the typically sprawling and far-fetched Grisham plot. I told him how much I liked his performance in "Husbands and Wives." "Maybe I should just be an actor," he self-mockingly moaned.

No filmmaker with a roster that includes "The Scalphunters," "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" "The Way We Were" and "Tootsie" should think of giving up directing. But no one who can embody wised-up (yet confused) urban men with as much depth and panache as Pollack should deprive audiences of his acting. Maybe he and Mike Nichols (an epochal creep in the film and play "The Designated Mourner") and Mark Rydell (indelible in "The Long Goodbye" and as Meyer Lansky in Pollack's own "Havana") should start the Director-Actors Co.

• View blog reactions