I know that sophistry makes me tired has already diaried the official obit (which I appreciate), but I have a little more to say about Sydney Pollack, who died tonight at 73, than can reasonably fit in a comment.
To wit: Pollack was a rare creature in Hollywood: Someone who made movies, successful movies, for no apparent reason other than to manifest his great, highly evolved sense of what's good and interesting in the world, and what's worth contributing to the medium. In this roiling election season, this is important: Here was a man who stood for principles and quality in an industry and an era that was, and still is, all about quick hits and sound bites. And money.
We're not just talking skilled storytelling here, although Pollack as a producer knew what made a good story, and as a director knew how to construct one. Nor was he ever didactic. But looking back on his career, from They Shoot Horses, Don't They? to Absence of Malice to Michael Clayton to Recount, it's astonishing to realize how many times Pollack produced or directed movies that were cultural or political critiques as well as frothy entertainment. They may have been fun, but they were also movies that meant something. Movies that mattered.
I've never been much of a cinephile. I tend to care more about infrastructure and EPA politics than I do about what happens in Hollywood. But I happen to be engaged to a man who cares very much about movies, and just as I've managed to get him to care about the siting of transmission corridors and how Los Angeles treats its stormwater, he's persuaded me to pay attention to well-made movies, and who makes them.
So while I may have known for decades that Three Days of the Condor shaped my thinking about How the World Works, it's only in the last few years that I connected the ethic behind that movie to the man who directed and acted in Tootsie and, more recently, produced and acted in the wonderful, redemptive, Michael Clayton. Pollack made movies that were deeply felt, that brimmed with integrity. And, as my movie-expert fella says on his own blog:
[He] also got some of the best career performances out of a number of Hollywood icons (see, besides Hoffman [in Tootsie] and Redford [Three Days of the Condor], Paul Newman's stellar work in Absence of Malice), and he was a pleasure to behold when he acted on screen himself; a nervy confidence, a kind of expansive reveling in his own bristling intelligence makes his roles in Tootsie and Michael Clayton infinitely watchable . . .
He was also among the people who founded the Sundance Institute and its corresponding festival which, in his own words, "revitalized independent filmmaking." Through the production company he ran with Anthony Minghella (who also died this year, in March, sadly), he made a beautiful documentary about Frank Gehry, Sketches, despite being "totally naive about both documentaries and architecture." ("I didn't do it because I was a filmmaker," he said. "I did it because I wanted to know more.") He made movies for the same reasons Kossacks blog: Because he couldn't help himself.
And of course, he was a Democrat.
Sydney Pollack, we were lucky to have you.