It has now been nearly four days since filmmaker Sydney Pollack passed away. The loss was not crippling for me, however, because of equal parts expectancy and, strangely, indifference.
As fine a filmmaker as Pollack was, he was always something of an afterthought in my cinema-going experience.
I want to be measured here, because the last thing I mean is disrespect. In fact, I’m aiming more toward appreciation of a sort of confident casualness that has been eradicated in this fresh new world of cock-sure filmmaking youths and the veterans who, at times, struggle to keep up, and at others, tap into their own former risk-taking ways to establish a new vision of the “old school.”
Pollack was never about that. He seemed to make his way from film to film with grace and a willingness to take stock of the lessons that came. I never knew him — can’t offer any first hand accounts of exchange — but if anything about his May 26 death strikes a profound chord with me, it is to know that an ever agreeable constant has been removed from this business, this art form. Sometimes the disconnect of casual dependency can sting as much as the loss of the closest of comrades.