Death Notice: Sydney Pollack

Sydney Pollack rates about half a dozen references in Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock'n'Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, which means, I guess, that Biskind doesn't consider Pollack (who died yesterday at the age of 73) one of those saviors. Well, fuck Peter Biskind. I'm not knocking Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Dennis Hopper, Paul Schrader or Brian DePalma - I like a lot of their movies, too - but at least Pollack never got high off his own supply and turned into a pathetic caricature of himself. Pollack's father had been a pharmacist and his mother went mad... what a split to find yourself in between. Turning his back on medicine (his father had wanted him to pursue a career in dentistry), Pollack nonetheless brought a surgical precision to his craft as an actor and, later, a director known for handling actors well. Sydney Pollack knew from pain - he was born midway through The Great Depression, the family suffered antisemitism, his parents divorced early on, his mother died of alcoholism when he was a teenager, and Pollack lost his own first-born son in an air crash in 1993 - and you can see that understanding about the fragility of life and the fleetingness of happiness in all of his movies... most acutely in the really good stuff like THIS PROPERTY IS CONDEMNED (1966), THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON'T THEY? (1969), THE YAKUZA (1974), THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR (1975), ABSENCE OF MALICE (1981) and OUT OF AFRICA (1985), the latter of which transcends its big ticket star casting (and miscasting, in the case of Robert Redford) to address issues of unquenched yearning and measured triumph over unendurable tragedy. I'm feeling that tragedy today, I don't mind telling you. I knew Sydney Pollack was gravely ill and was on some level expecting this but I am nonetheless blindsided by the loss.

Miss you, buddy.