Marcia Gay Harden is perfect as his wife, the painter Lee Krasner, in a role that’s satisfyingly developed.
Harris, who also directs, does a great job of articulating the artist’s gifts and his mental struggles, often at the same time. It can’t have been an easy role, but he convinces in the part to the extent that it’s impossible to imagine any other actor doing it so well.
Jennifer Connelly plays Ruth Kligman, who Pollock had an affair with shortly before his death in a car accident.
Darwin (Paul Bettany) attempts to complete On the Origin of Species while dealing with the grief of his daughter Annie’s death. He’s also semi-estranged from his wife Emma (Jennifer Connelly), and his theories about the beginnings of life on Earth are inflaming tensions in the God-fearing community.
There are impressive scenes of nature, illustrating the idea of evolution as Darwin perceives it.
Bettany’s compelling performance lifts the film and makes it highly watchable. Connelly brings a welcome complexity to her part as she tries to reconcile her love for her husband with her love of the God his life’s work debunks.
A diamond smuggler working in Sierra Leone (Leonardo DiCaprio) begins to examine his motives after meeting an American investigative journalist and a local man who has been separated from his wife and son.
DiCaprio is compelling but not quite at his best. Maybe it’s his South African accent that makes him a little less convincing than usual. That said, his character development as the film progresses is extremely well done. I liked Jennifer Connelly as the journalist, too.
The film makes some strong moral points about trading in "conflict diamonds", but because DiCaprio’s character is presented as amoral it’s not as heavy-handed or judgemental as it might have been.
The sets are often inspired – in particular, the camera trickery that brings to life a series of impossible Escher-like staircases – and some of the puppets are highly inventive. But the aesthetics are ugly and parts of the plot seem stilted or disjointed. It’s less than a sum of its parts. The script went through multiple rewrites and it’s fascinating to see glimpses of plot threads that were either cut or left undeveloped.
Bowie seems uncomfortably miscast, lost in the labyrinth of his mid-1980s career. Even when he gets to sing, he’s performing some of his weakest material – so Labyrinth doesn’t work as a musical either. He should have been more extreme – nastier and funnier, hamming it up like a pantomime villain. Instead, it’s an oddly tepid performance.
Beyond those points it’s difficult to say why it ends up being a bit of an awkward mess – albeit an enjoyable mess. Indeed, it’s nearly brilliant, but the difference between nearly brilliant and actually brilliant turns out to be a huge one.
