Watching Ed Harris play an aging, depressed, but still likeable writer who faces a reunion with his estranged daughter in "Winter Passing," is both an upper and a downer.

This is an actor who has been getting more internal throughout his career.

He works from inside out, despite the fact that he has been costumed in suburban Michigan tatters and in a stringy, thin, white mop of a haircut.

The world revolves around this once famous, but now reclusive novelist. Other characters live with him. And their role is to feed, comfort and protect him from savaging admirers from the MFA program at Iowa, no less.

Which of course, leads me to my point.

There is an undeniable energy given off by creative luminaries, and it is this force field, that enables them to be eccentric, and deserving of our time and serious attention, though they may be fall down drunk before breakfast.

I had the great opportunity in my doctoral program at USC to study with a Visiting Professor Emeritus from The University of Iowa, a patriarch in the field of Rhetoric, and a very decent gentleman, who, to my knowledge, had no disabling vices.

I did some of my finest original research and wrote some of my best papers for his seminars. His sessions were surprisingly, but happily populated by no more than a handful of eager and respectful admirers.

Why did I do some of my most important work in his presence?

Maybe that word is a clue: presence.

He had it, and great contributors do, and this is why it is so important to invest time with them.

For all of his talent, Ed Harris doesn't seem to portray the kind of positive influence that makes mentoring so significant. He might be a famous writer; we're told this. But, apart from the diligent caring of his minions, we don't see how he merits this special attention.

Contrast this with yet another great man with whom I studied, and for whom I was an unofficial chauffeur on Saturdays, after class: Peter F. Drucker.

He just passed away at 95, but I knew him as a sprightly 80 year-old. I got more from our time together, merely by chatting and by being in the same space, than most people get, studying for 10 years with his inferiors.

If only Harris could have been better in this film, another generation of grateful and willing apprentices could have been spawned!