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WHO THE $#%& IS JACKSON POLLOCK?
Written & Directed by: Harry Moses.
Produced by: Steven Hewitt & Moses.
Director of Photography: William Cassara.
Edited by: Jay Freund.
Music by: Terence Blanchard.
Released by: Picturehouse.
Country of Origin: USA. 74 min. Rated: PG-13.

Who needs a piercingly satiric mockumentary when you have this lively documentary’s broad, real-life personalities? Even Christopher Guest would have a hard time competing with the verbal thrusts of this art world exposé. The film’s central mystery is whether a painting bought for five dollars by Teri Horton is a lost painting by Jackson Pollock, whose works have now surpassed Picasso’s at the auction house.

At home in front of the camera, the 73-year-old former long-haul trucker with an eighth grade education has the gift of gab. Horton’s assessment of her 15-year battle against the art world elite is perhaps too colorful for PBS (“You ain’t going to believe this sh**”), having a similar biting and wary sense of humor as Roseanne. One of her yarns is a ludicrous attempt to provide the painting’s provenance, its history of ownership. The thrift shop where she bought it is out of business, plus it lacks a signature. Not knowing where it came from, she made it up. In her telling (cheekily reenacted in black and white), Pollock did the painting during a drunken weekend at a California resort, partying with Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, and that interfering “bitch” Joan Crawford. One art dealer even believed her tale. However, the abstract work is dismissed by many including Thomas Hoving, formerly of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as “superficial, dead on arrival.” His thick glasses magnify his disdain. And he should know, he tells his interviewer; he’s an expert. The class divide couldn’t be more delineated.

However, forensic science lends credibility to Horton’s claim, notably a fingerprint found behind Horton’s canvas, which matches another found in Pollock’s East Hampton, NY, studio, the artist’s private domain where even his wife, Lee Krasner, had limited access. Armed with convincing evidence, Horton gains allies within the art world, including dealer Tod Volpe, who, incidentally, served a two-year prison sentence for defrauding his clientele, including actor Jack Nicholson. But an offer for the painting for two million dollars is dismissed. Horton holds out. She wants to hit the bulls-eye, and her determination may not be unrealistic. Just last week The New York Times reported that a Pollock painting, No. 5, 1948, had been sold by David Geffen for a record-breaking $140 million.

Refreshingly, the compact film accepts as a given that art is in the eye of the beholder. (When she first bought her painting, to cheer up a friend, Horton thought it was a piece of junk.) But for those with or without some knowledge of modern art history, what made Pollock the seminal artist of the mid-20th century is better conveyed here than in the glum biopic Pollock. Kent Turner
November 15, 2006