Pauline Kael (41 page)

In October 1974, Pauline wrote a review of Karel Reisz’s
The Gambler
, the story of a New York City English professor (James Caan) with a gambling addiction. She judged it as “strikingly well-edited and . . . dramatically supercharged and compelling.” But it was one of Pauline’s least favorite kinds of picture, one that was too worked out and schematic. Speaking, as she loved to do, directly to the audience, she wrote that it was “complete without us, and there’s nothing for us to do except receive it, feel wiped out, and genuflect.”

The screenplay for
The Gambler
was written by the young James Toback, who was not at all pleased when he read Pauline’s review. She felt that the movie tried to tell the audience that “the secret of gambling is that gamblers are self-destructive people who want to lose.” She thought compulsive gambling had a much simpler source: “The poor bastard who buys a two-dollar ticket he can’t afford is hoping to change his life with the two dollars. How else can he change it?”

Not long afterward Toback met Pauline, who was attending a screening in New York with Gina, and quickly confronted her. “I always enjoy reading you,” Toback said, “so I was really disturbed to find that the one critic I enjoy reading totally missed the boat on my movie. I’m not talking about whether you liked it or didn’t—you just got it wrong. You were so blind with your own personal fury that you didn’t actually get what’s right on the screen for someone who’s listening to hear.” Pauline, curious, wanted him to explain. Toback continued, “The whole point in the review was that the movie says gamblers gamble to lose. And that is an idiotic statement. The opposite is in the movie.”

As they were getting into the elevator, Pauline suggested that they go out to dinner, so that Toback could explicate further on what he felt she had missed. Over a lengthy meal at O’Neal’s he and Pauline talked into the night, while Gina remained silent. “For a while I just felt awkward and tried to direct some of my comments toward her,” he recalled, “but I saw after a while that this was probably not unusual.”

There was another point in Pauline’s review of
The Gambler
that stung Toback. She had commented that the picture featured “a lot of characters, but there is really only one, and he is the author’s surrogate, the brilliant young Jewish prince, professor of literature to ghetto blacks, potential great novelist, and gambler.” After their dinner, he and Pauline became fast friends, and over time, he thought he understood the source of her comment about his being a Jewish prince. Toback had in fact come from a well-to-do New York family, while Pauline had come from working-class stock. “She never liked to talk about being Jewish,” Toback observed. “It was never anything she really identified with. At the same time, she had a real social and cultural antagonism for Jews she felt were sort of pretenders to society. She felt the character in
The Gambler
was that, and therefore I must be.” To Toback, Pauline’s conflicts about being Jewish were securely rooted in her relationship with her father, a working-class man who was looked down on by certain strata of society—in particular, by other, wealthier Jews. Toback believed that Pauline had grown up eager to establish herself as a personal force, but that it was important to her that she do this without betraying her father and what he was. She would not look down on him. “She thought, ‘I’m just what he was. I just happen to be writing interestingly about a popular art. And you don’t have to know what John Simon knows to be the best at it.”

At year’s end she saw another movie that enabled her to dig into a film the way she liked to do—
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
. Pauline’s suggestion to Robert Getchell that it would be perfect for Robert Altman hadn’t come to fruition, although the finished film, with its evocative portrayal of the world of dive bars baking in the Arizona sunshine, had an Altman feel. Ellen Burstyn, who had been cast in the lead, had seen
Mean Streets
and eventually decided that Martin Scorsese would be able to bring to the story the grit she felt it needed.

Alice
was a movie that the critics were bound to embrace; dozens of reviews mentioned that the movie had come along at just the right point, given the paucity of good women’s roles onscreen. Pauline, too, liked
Alice
very much, and what she came up with for
The New Yorker
was one of her most complex—and baffling—reviews of the ’70s.

She wrote that it was “one of the rare films that genuinely deserve to be called controversial . . .
Alice
is thoroughly enjoyable: funny, absorbing, intelligent even when you don’t believe in what’s going on—when the issues it raises get all fouled up.”

She referred to
Alice
as “the first angry-young-woman movie”—as portrayed by Ellen Burstyn, Alice had a sharp edge, and her temper was quick to rise to the surface. But she liked the way Scorsese handled the scenes with Alice and her fresh-mouthed son (Alfred Sutter), as well as his avoidance of phony Hollywood warmth. Pauline’s difficulty in getting her mind around
Alice
was most likely due to her uneasiness with what she took to be the movie’s feminist agenda. And in taking this position, she jumped to conclusions about Burstyn’s performance for which she could not possibly have had the least foundation:

By writing “The trouble with Ellen Burstyn’s performance is that she’s playing against something instead of playing a character,” Pauline was speculating on the private thought processes of the actress—something she could have had no idea about. She accused Burstyn of striking “so many of those discordant notes that she must think it’s a sign of liberation for Alice to be defiantly short-tempered.” It was crystal-ball gazing, pure and simple—and quite out of critical bounds.

Despite the fact that her review of
Alice
was essentially a positive one, her comments about Ellen Burstyn wounded the actress. Only four years earlier Burstyn had written Pauline a warm thank-you letter for a positive review of her performance in Paul Mazursky’s
Alex in Wonderland
. After the
Alice
review appeared, however, Pauline was not a topic Burstyn was fond of discussing.

Later in February Pauline wrote a review that would, indirectly, come to have enormous impact on her career. Hal Ashby’s
Shampoo
was one of the most lavishly praised films of the ’70s—a thoughtfully observed and well-acted film about George (Warren Beatty, who also produced and coscripted it), a sexually rapacious Beverly Hills hairdresser who jumps from bed to bed on the eve of the presidential election of 1968. It was designed as a contemporary comedy of manners, and the screenplay, coauthored by Robert Towne, had a subtle, knowing humor and a great sense of structure: It was a little like a Congreve play for the pre-Nixon era.

Pauline, in synch with her colleagues, felt that
Shampoo
“might have been no more than a saucy romp . . . But the way it has been done, the joke expands the more you think about it.
Shampoo
is light and impudent, yet like the comedies that live on, it’s a bigger picture in retrospect.” What she loved most about it, perhaps, was its honest, dead-on portrayal of how people in a privileged society such as Beverly Hills viewed sex, and its perception of the L.A. experience that no other movie had ever quite captured: It expressed “the emotional climate of the time and place. Los Angeles has become what it is because of the bright heat, which turns people into narcissists and sensuous provocateurs. The atmosphere seems to infantilize sex: sexual desire is despir-itualized; it becomes a demand for immediate gratification.”

For Warren Beatty,
Shampoo
represented a personal triumph. Since
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
, he had worked fairly steadily in a string of disappointing pictures, but nothing he had done since
Bonnie and Clyde
had had much impact. Pauline found his performance as George in
Shampoo
genuinely impressive; she knew that George wasn’t “an easy role; I don’t know anyone else who could have played it.” In the review she included a line that sounded a bit close to the kind of review that seemed designed to be easily excerpted in movie advertising: She called
Shampoo
“the most virtuoso example of sophisticated kaleidoscopic farce that American moviemakers have ever come up with.” It was an early sign of the “absolutist” streak in her reviewing, a tendency that had been fairly latent up until recent years. From this point on, however, she would often describe films and performances in terms of extremes—the best or the worst examples in history.

Directly on the heels of
Shampoo
she undertook what was the boldest move of her career to date. Robert Altman’s new picture,
Nashville
, had begun filming in the summer of 1974, and it was the director’s most ambitious project yet—an attempt to catch the spirit and pulse of mid-’70s America by way of a story set in the country music capital. Although the tone of
Nashville
was intimate, the film unfolded on a broad canvas: There were twenty-four principal characters in all, several of them played by major stars. Among them were the stud country singer Tom Frank (Keith Carradine), Opal (Geraldine Chaplin), a sycophantic groupie posing as a BBC reporter, the strung-out country star Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley), the adulterous gospel singer Linnea (Lily Tomlin), and third-party presidential candidate Hal Phillip Walker (Thomas Hal Phillips).

Pauline made a brief visit to the set of
Nashville
to tape an interview with Altman to be broadcast on European television. As she had when she showed up for the filming of
Thieves Like Us
, she saw enough to give her a good idea of what the director was after—and of course, his choice of a pop-culture subject like Nashville was already to her liking. “She was very entertaining and interesting and funny about herself—self-deprecating,” Michael Murphy, who was in the cast, remembered. “Bob was one of the guys who, if you crossed him, he’d let you know about it. He yelled at her a couple of times, and she’d say, ‘Oh, Bob . . .’ And then she would come back with a good review or a not-so-good review, and they’d be friends again. He didn’t court her in the same way a lot of people would. He courted her, but he was himself, and he wasn’t paying homage, really. He was very happy that she understood him and what he was trying to do.”

Murphy also sensed something else beneath Pauline’s convivial surface: “I always had a feeling about Pauline—that there was a certain kind of disdain, from the beginning—that I was not really worthy of being in these movies, that there were a lot of people who were better than I was. She would give me a shot in some review, but I would see her someplace, and I liked her, and she liked me. And eventually, I got a good review from her!”

Sue Barton, director of publicity for Altman’s production company, Lion’s Gate Pictures, remembered Pauline’s visit to the
Nashville
set and her fascination as she sat with the director, watching the dailies. “Bob was very flattered by how wonderful she thought he was,” recalled Barton. “I would say she was slightly star-struck. She was so important to the filmmakers, and she had so much power. Being able to quote Pauline Kael was probably the best thing you could ever wish for. She was this little person with her little glasses and her little bowl haircut. She was far from beautiful, and this aspect of her personality allowed her to be with beautiful and interesting people and have a lot of clout. And everybody wanted her to be their friend. Bob was a genuine talent and a genuine eccentric, and that was her love for him.”

Nashville
’s shooting schedule stretched to a little over seven weeks, and then the extensive editing process began. By early 1975 the picture was still not quite completed, but Altman wanted to show it in New York, and Lion’s Gate issued invitations to a select few, including Pauline. She was stunned by how brilliant
Nashville
had turned out to be, and throughout the screening, she gasped, clapped her hands together, laughed loudly, and took notes furiously. The next day she telephoned Lion’s Gate to ask if it would be acceptable for her to review the film in advance; she knew what the box-office fate of most of Altman’s pictures had been, and she had dug around enough to get the sense that
Nashville
’s distributor, Paramount Pictures, wasn’t fully behind the movie. The person who took her call told her, “That’s what the screening was for.” This was the answer Pauline wanted to hear:
Nashville
was scheduled for a summer release, and unless she leaped into action now, the chance to review it would go to Penelope Gilliatt. And Pauline knew that no matter what Gilliatt wrote, her review couldn’t possibly help the film find its audience.

She talked Shawn into letting her run the review in advance, and it appeared in the March 3, 1975, issue of
The New Yorker
. It opened with one of her favorite devices, the rhetorical question: