When we first see Harden's Krasner, with her Bettie Page hairdo and rack to match, he's her new neighbor. She forces her way into Jackson's studio, examining his paintings with a scrutiny that harbors mostly wonder and just a scrap of jealousy. The way she moves about that studio in her first few minutes of screen time tells you almost everything you need to know about her character: Solid and sturdy, with a flat-footed, deliberate, erotically charged walk, she's the Wife of Bath by way of Brooklyn. But it's also clear from the start that she's an intellectual in a hausfrau's body. She falls in love with Pollock the man, and there's tenderness there; but the lioness love she feels for his painting -- the place where his truest self lives -- is all blood, heart and guts.

Harden doesn't play Krasner as Pollock's victim; if anything, she's a willing victim of her own will. Harden's reading of Krasner leaves no room for wilting self-pity; she plays Krasner as being fortified somewhat by supple, innate strength but also by her power as a gargantuan nag. Her Krasner is a figure so strong in her own right that not even one of the biggest, most troubled geniuses of the 20th century can wrestle her down. In an early scene, she turns to Pollock and, aware of his inherent unpredictability and sexual infidelities, announces baldly in her thick Brooklynese, as if she were gently but firmly admonishing him to pick up his socks, "I want to get married, Pollock. I think you're a great artist. I want very much to keep living with you. But I want that commitment from you, too. You'll have to make the decision." With complete calm and naturalness, she returns to what she was doing, while he lets the speech sink in as if it had been uttered in a language from another planet. He's not sure whether he's lost or found.

Harden also shows us the toll that her life takes on her. The marriage was never an easy one, but toward the end (Pollock died in an auto crash in 1956) the emotional violence within the union became feverishly unbearable. Krasner never crumples, and the fact that she laid her own career aside for his is barely mentioned in the movie. (Why mention it when it's a throbbing, ever-present undercurrent?)

But Harden plays Krasner as a woman who took the only path possible; you can see it in the set of her jaw, in the way she refuses to melt down in any traditionally "womanly" way when she's in pain. What good would it have done for her to throw temper tantrums to match her husband's? And played back on the grand scheme of history, would the art world have been better off if she'd focused on her own career instead of nurturing Pollock's? That's a hard truth to face, but an essential one.

As it was, and as Harden plays it here, Krasner was the midwife, a role that's held in great esteem when one is helping to bring actual babies into the world. Why shouldn't we think of paintings the same way? Would Pollock have been a genius without Krasner? Most assuredly. Would he have been the same genius without her? Definitely not.

The distillation of everything that "Pollock" should have been is swirling around inside Harden's performance. Sometimes you have to match boldness stroke for stroke, or splatter by splatter. Harris, as a director, just doesn't have it in him to stand up to Pollock, but Harden does. And she understands what Krasner must have known intuitively. Greatness comes not from cleaning up messes, but from allowing them to be made in the first place.

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