Sydney Pollack: Absence of Malice
Pollack described how he came to make Absence of Malice as a “screenplay my agents gave me; it’s as
simple as that.” This kind of rare, personal detachment from the project is
evident throughout the film and makes for one of the most painful viewing
experiences of Pollack’s oeuvre. Oh, not because the movie is bad or even
boring, there’s just something missing here (I think it’s primarily conviction and
energy in its subject matter) that makes it quite the lacking experience when
held up to other famous procedural films. But it’s also lacking in the
conviction found in almost all of Pollack’s previous films. In Jeremiah Johnson, The Yakuza, and Bobby
Deerfield, that personal attachment is evident as Pollack often stated that
those films were a labor of love. Here, Pollack may have thought Absence of Malice was a good film – the commercial
success of the film makes a case that something
worked in the movie – but there’s also a sense that the film was a stopgap
for Pollack before he begin production on his two most critically successful
films that rounded out the ‘80s, Tootsie and
Out of Africa.