Pauline Kael (58 page)

Reviewing the book in
The New York Times Book Review
, Gerald Mast called Pauline’s work “fiercely impressionistic and aggressively untheoretical,” and praised her “powerful perceptions and terrific writing.” He went on to say that he found her self-confidence in her own impressions somewhat exhausting at times—he felt that, occasionally, he longed for her to ponder the meaning of a film rather than state it so boldly. And he objected to her review of
Rich and Famou
s—not for the reasons Stuart Byron had, but because he felt that she had not adequately considered, or even mentioned, George Cukor’s long career in dialogue comedy. “No auteurist critic, of the sort Miss Kael so vehemently despises, would ever have done so poor a job at
thinking
about this director,” Mast wrote.

 

By the mid-1980s the nature of movie criticism itself had begun to change dramatically. In keeping with the tone in recent Hollywood films, reviewing had become lighter and more “entertainment” driven. Increasingly, national newsmagazines put movies on their covers that they thought were likely to connect with a wide sector of the public and become iconic. While Pauline did not object to movies getting cover stories in
Time
and
Newsweek
, she was quite aware that this meant that magazine publishers brought pressure to bear on their reviewers to write about the films in question positively—a practice she abhorred.

TV critics had a new visibility, thanks mostly to the success of the Chicago-based reviewers Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, who became popular in the mid-1970s with a local TV program of film reviews that eventually became known as
Sneak Previews
. Siskel and Ebert had a regular-guy appeal, a shoot-from-the-hip, commonsense style of addressing their viewers. Their reviews were short and punchy and argumentative, always capped by a “Thumbs Up” or “Thumbs Down” summation. The format caught on, and in 1978, they moved to PBS. In 1982 their audience grew substantially when they changed their show’s title to
At the Movies
and went into national syndication. Siskel and Ebert became enormous pop-culture figures, and signaled a major change in what people wanted from film reviewing. They weren’t critics, exactly—at least not on their television show—but consumer guides, for whom the ultimate point was to let the audience know whether or not they should spend their hard-earned money at the box office. Siskel and Ebert were at the forefront of the “sound bite” movement—their message was fast, punchy, memorable, and made few demands of their viewers. It was also effective: The director Albert Brooks remembered that his 1985 film
Lost in America
had a limited release; the week after Siskel and Ebert gave the movie two “Thumbs Up,” it tripled its business.

The New York Film Critics Circle, meanwhile, remained as divided as ever. It was widely perceived that there were two basic camps, one led by Sarris and the other by Kael. It had become a game with those members who didn’t avidly belong to one camp or the other to see which came out on top in each year’s voting process. Rumors continued to the effect that Pauline commandeered her followers and “suggested” to them how they might vote, a charge that was difficult to prove. Certainly she didn’t get her way in the final voting with any degree of consistency. The same held true for the National Society of Film Critics. David Ansen remembered his excitement at being inducted into the society, but at the first meeting, the level of venom in the room was shocking. “Pauline’s archenemy, Richard Schickel, was there,” recalled Ansen. “I couldn’t believe the behavior that was going on. He was acting like a sort of naughty, nasty frat boy and he was literally making insulting comments about Pauline’s legs. He didn’t say it to her face. There were a lot of great feuds—not overtly between Pauline and Andrew Sarris. The only times I would see them in the same room were at these voting meetings, and they tended to ignore each other.” Ansen rejected the idea that Pauline insisted on people’s slavishly agreeing with her views on movies. On several occasions she would tell him that she had admired a review he had written for
Newsweek
, and at times his opinion had differed significantly from her own.

In early 1985 Pauline surprised her longtime readers by sharply deviating from her reviewing past: She gave her approval to a David Lean picture,
A Passage to India
, based on the famous E. M. Forster novel. While the book was not the sort that she responded to as enthusiastically as she had
The Bostonians
or the great Russian novels, she did feel that
A Passage to India
was “suggestive and dazzlingly empathic.”

She believed Lean’s film version to be “an admirable piece of work, because the director’s control”—the very quality for which she had attacked him earlier—had “a kind of benign precision . . . because of the performers (and the bright-colored, fairy-tale vividness of the surroundings.)” Lean’s reading of the book was “intelligent and enjoyable, and if his technique is to simplify and to spell everything out in block letters, this kind of clarity has its own formal strength. It may not be the highest praise to say that a movie is orderly and dignified or that it’s like a well-cared-for, beautifully oiled machine, but of its kind this
Passage to India
is awfully good.”

What intrigued her most about the film was that it seemed “informed by a spirit of magisterial self-hatred. That’s its oddity: Lean’s grand ‘objective’ manner—he never touches anything without defining it and putting it in its place—seems to have developed out of the values he attacks. It’s an imperial bookkeeper’s style—no loose ends. It’s also the style that impressed the Indians, and shamed them because they couldn’t live up to it. It’s the style of the conqueror—who is here the guilt-ridden conqueror but the conqueror nevertheless.” Forster did not neatly tie up the novel’s situations; Lean was a careful, precise filmmaker who arranged everything neatly in place. “What’s remarkable about the film is how two such different temperaments as Forster’s and Lean’s could come together,” Pauline wrote.

For Pauline, the most exhilarating movie of the summer of 1985 was John Huston’s mob family comedy
Prizzi’s Honor
. Huston was in the midst of his late-career resurgence, which had begun with
The Man Who Would Be King
;
Prizzi’s Honor
was a beautifully sustained satire—the characters are delightfully corrupt, discussing murder in the same calm, matter-of-fact terms that most families use to discuss house payments and insurance matters. Pauline wrote, “If John Huston’s name were not on
Prizzi’s Honor
, I’d have thought a fresh new talent had burst on the scene, and he’d certainly be the hottest new director in Hollywood. . . . It’s like
The Godfather
acted out by The Munsters, with passionate, lyrical arias from Italian operas pointing up their low-grade sentimentality.” At seventy-eight, Huston’s touch was as sure as it been in his glory days; Pauline approved of Jack Nicholson, who she thought would “do anything for the role he’s playing, and he has a just about infallible instinct for how far he can take the audience with him.” She also heralded the breakthrough of the director’s daughter, Anjelica Huston, who played the family granddaughter Maerose like “a Borgia princess, a high-fashion Vampira who moves like a swooping bird and talks in a honking Brooklynese that comes out of the corner of her twisted mouth.... she has the imperiousness of a Maria Callas or a Silvana Mangano.”

For all her excitement there was a certain lack of cohesiveness in her review of
Prizzi’s Honor
that she had seldom shown. It seemed overlong, and not quite all of a piece, as if she were so astonished to find a film this good that she was no longer quite sure how to convey her enthusiasm.

F
ew actors ever drew forth Pauline’s venom in quite the same way that Clint Eastwood did. As the years rolled on, her dislike for his particular brand of monotone machismo had ripened into near-contempt. She considered it a sign of the way movies had gone off track that Martin Scorsese was now (she believed) in decline, and Robert Altman was all but a back number—yet Eastwood’s star remained as potent as ever. His one-dimensional screen personality had weathered the years, and unlike old-time action and Western stars such as Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea, he wasn’t appearing in increasingly marginalized vehicles. Rather, there was a new weight, even a self-conscious “importance” about his films. When he began to be hailed as an artist for involving himself with more serious subject matter, Pauline was dumbfounded.

Pale Rider
, released in the summer of 1985, was a good example: a Western about a Mysterious Stranger who appears to help a scraggly band of gold miners stand up to an evil land baron. Eastwood played this ethereal avenger role with a straight face, and Pauline hooted at the pretensions of the high-toned Western: “This tall, gaunt-faced Stranger sometimes wears clerical garb and is addressed as Preacher,” she wrote. “When he takes off his shirt, his back has shapely bullet holes, like stigmata, and when he opens his mouth sententious words of wisdom fall out of it—gems like ‘There’s plain few problems can’t be solved with a little sweat and some hard work.’ If this is how people beyond the grave talk, I’d just as soon they didn’t come back to visit.” The movie, however, was a hit, and Eastwood continued to maintain, in Pauline’s words, “a career out of his terror of expressiveness.” Several of Pauline’s friends thought her vilification of Eastwood revealed a certain attraction to him. “A lot of people thought she was really turned on by Clint Eastwood,” said Ray Sawhill. “He was the big, macho, alpha male, and Pauline just loved beating up on him. And I think there were reasons
why
she loved beating up on him.”

Her disappointment in the path taken by Scorsese surfaced once more in her review of
After Hours
, the director’s comic nightmare about a man who loses his money and spends an insane night stumbling through flakiest SoHo.
After Hours
had the chaotic, nothing-can-go-right structure of a bad dream, and it had amusing performances and bits of business, but Pauline thought Scorsese’s tone couldn’t sustain itself. “His work here is livelier and more companionable than it has been in recent years; the camera scoots around, making jokes—or, at least, near-jokes,” she wrote. “But the movie keeps telling you to laugh, even though these near-jokes are about all you get. Soon it becomes clear that the episodes aren’t going anywhere—that what you’re seeing is a random series of events in a picture that just aspires to be an entertaining trifle and doesn’t make it.” It disturbed her that Scorsese seemed to be “using his skills . . . like a hired hand, making a vacuous, polished piece of consumer goods—all surface.”

In some ways, the essential Pauline hadn’t changed over the years: In the mid-’80s she was still much more inclined to embrace an oddball trifle such as
Pee-wee’s Big Adventure
(“I liked the movie’s unimportance. It isn’t
saying
anything”) than she was a big-budget, prestige picture like Sydney Pollack’s
Out of Africa
(“Meryl Streep has used too many foreign accents on us, and this new one gives her utterances an archness, a formality—it puts quotation marks around everything she says”) or Steven Spielberg’s
The Color Purple
. The film, based on the enormously popular novel by Alice Walker about the lifetime of indignities suffered by Celie, a poor, battered, sexually abused Georgia black woman, before she eventually finds her own path to self-respect, marked Spielberg’s first venture into human drama, and Pauline didn’t think he showed much talent for it. “Spielberg’s
The Color Purple
is probably the least authentic in feeling of any of his full-length films,” she wrote; “the people on the screen are like characters operated by Frank Oz. . . . The movie is amorphous; it’s a pastoral about the triumph of the human spirit, and it blurs on you.”

For Pauline it was never enough to take on starkly dramatic subject matter—one had to do something with it. On this particular point, she got into further trouble with another picture she covered at the same time, Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour-plus documentary on the Nazi death factories,
Shoah
, which was released to an almost universally rapturous critical reception at the end of 1985.

Pauline’s unsentimental attitude toward her Jewish background hadn’t changed over the years. The idea that she might be one of the “chosen” struck her as absurd, and she resented the sense of entitlement she perceived in many members of the New York Jewish literary community. She had no more tolerance for the religious feelings of Jews than she had for those of Christians. Charles Simmons remembered a night when he invited Jack Greenberg, an attorney and later dean of Columbia College, Greenberg’s wife, and Pauline all to dinner at his apartment. Simmons made a baked ham, and when they all sat down to dinner, Mrs. Greenberg exclaimed, “I can’t eat that!” “Oh, for Chrissake, are you kidding?” snapped Pauline. “That medieval bullshit?” Simmons quickly prepared Mrs. Greenberg a plate of scrambled eggs, but he recalled thinking that Pauline’s attitude was so contemptuous because she considered such thinking irrational.

Pauline sat through the entire length of
Shoah
(in two parts) at regular showings in a theater, not at a private screening, since she wanted to gauge the audience’s response. She later wrote that the large crowd for the first section had largely dwindled away by the time the second was shown (though this was denied by her old friend Dan Talbot, who had acquired the film’s distribution rights in New York).
Shoah
was the most comprehensive film ever made about the death-camp experience, but Pauline felt it contained few moments of genuine beauty. Lanzmann’s approach to his subject struck her as highly self-conscious and arty, played out at a punishing length. She hated the insistent way that the camera kept returning ominously to the railroad tracks that led to the camps. She believed that everyone who saw
Shoah
was being asked to surrender unconditionally to the view of Nazi horrors that it presented, and she was unable to find that level of surrender within herself.