David Edelstein pens a characteristically smart and moving eulogy to Sydney Pollack, the actor:
It began with Tootsie, a role that Pollack stepped into
reluctantly, and the reluctance is right there onscreen, in a good way:
The agent, George, just wants to do his job, eat his lunch. (That’s his motivation.) ...
In Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives, Pollack is even more
brilliantly instinctive. It helps that the actor to whom he’s reacting
is Judy Davis, whose motor would run too fast for almost any living
creature, let alone Pollack’s Jack — one of those patented Pollack
brisk executives with no time for a lot of neurotic nonsense. After
Jack leaves his wife (Davis) and takes up with a young blonde (the
marvelous Lysette Anthony — where is she?), Pollack hits a career peak.
Watch the scary scene in which he chases Anthony out of a party: This
is a man with a visceral horror of losing control who is losing control.
He didn’t lose it again like that onscreen, but few actors could make matter-of-factness so unnerving. His final scene in Eyes Wide Shut
was criticized for going on and on even by people who liked the movie,
but on its own terms the performance is perfect. Pollack is a rich guy
in his rec room telling Tom Cruise’s naïve doctor to back off, and his
pool playing is packed with portent — with purposeful indirection. His
motivation is to put everything back in its rightful pocket.
We tend to think of Pollack as a director who dabbled in acting, but Tootsie really was the hinge on which his career swung toward the latter and away from the former. After winning his Oscars three years later for Out of Africa, he directed just six films in the next 23 years, none of them particularly memorable. (The Firm probably comes closest.) In that same span, he appeared as an actor in nearly a dozen films and did a surprising amount of TV work as well ("The Sopranos," "Will and Grace," "Mad About You," "Frasier," etc.). And, as Edelstein notes, in these latter years the work he did in front of the camera was generally sharper than what he did behind it--especially in Husbands and Wives, Eyes Wide Shut, and Michael Clayton, but also in less celebrated roles in films such as A Civil Action and Changing Lanes. For all his directorial success in the 1960s, '70s, and early '80s, this is the Sydney Pollack whose gifts we will now miss.
--Christopher Orr