The perils of being Pauline

Is it a possible to write a sympathetic biography of a critic? I’m not sure; one thinks of Anto Ego, the hard-to-like food critic in Ratatouille. The vocation seems to invite peeved recollections from those who have suffered the critic’s tongue lashing at some point.

Famed movie critic Pauline Kael is no exception. From 1968 to 1991, Kael was the doyenne of film criticism for The New Yorker (well, co-doyenne; she shared her column duties at “The Current Cinema” with Penelope Gilliatt). But she was much more than that; she became perhaps the first superstar movie critic, one with legions of fans lining up to buy her essay collections like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and I Lost It At The Movies, sending her mountains of fan mail and calling her up to share their opinions about film.

In this age when everyone is a critic — and the Internet ensures that most people have access to not only a limitless downloadable film library, but an online pulpit from which to preach — it’s a little hard to conceive of Kael’s lofty perch back in the 1970s. 

Perhaps it’s best illustrated by an anecdote in A Life in the Dark, Brian Kellow’s biography of Kael, when she’s dining with cartoonist Al Hirschfeld and director Sydney Lumet, the set of whose 1966 film The Group she had just visited. Hirschfeld, noting that Kael was pretty drunk, got into a lively debate about movie criticism and asked her what she thought a critic’s job was. “My job,” Kael memorably snapped, pointing at Lumet, “is to show him which way to go.”

It’s hard to imagine that kind of chutzpah in a film critic these days — until you recall that the Internet and its legion of film geeks (sites like Ain’t It Cool) are nowadays even more irreverent towards directors and Hollywood. They do think they have a web-given right to lecture filmmakers.

And perhaps that’s one of the main points of A Life in the Dark: what Pauline Kael, with her Midwestern background, represented to the established world of newspaper and magazine criticism was a gloves-off approach; she was so passionate about film that her columns took on a messianic zeal which gained her, and eventually lost her, a lot of followers.

Along with the zeal came an erosion of civility. Kael’s writing could get very personal about directors, actors and actresses, and fellow critics. You didn’t want to be the recipient of her withering wit. When she carped about the sound quality in George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in a 1969 review (claiming it had “the dead sound of a studio”), the director didn’t take it lying down: “Listen, you miserable b*tch,” he wrote Kael, “you’ve got every right in the world to air your likes and dislikes, but you got no goddamn right at all to fake, at my expense, a phony technical knowledge you simply don’t have... You don’t like the sound, say so, but cut out that bullsh*t about how you know where it was done and made.”

Reportedly, Kael would read Hill’s letter out loud to friends with a gleeful cackle.

Her prose was probing yet direct, like she was sitting in the cinema seat right next to you. She often opened her reviews with a rhetorical question, as though summing up the cultural zeitgeist or the matter on everybody’s mind. She had a habit of using “we” instead of “I” when voicing her opinions on, say, Jane Fonda or Paul Schrader, as though she were speaking for the culture at large. At times, she did. She was a cultural icon, a celebrity, and it wasn’t just because she had the biggest voice. She genuinely felt she had her finger on the pulse of what movies should be, and she grounded this feeling not on strong critical theory, but on audience reaction: in her reviews Kael tended to mention how this or that audience was reacting to a movie, as though this summed up the moviegoing public.

All of this would be damning if she wasn’t usually correct in her opinions. Not “correct” as in “politically correct,” but gifted with insight into the heart of filmmaking. And she expressed it better and more entertainingly than most other movie critics.

It helped that Kael emerged at a time — the early ‘70s — when Hollywood was in the midst of a revolution: for a short time, a new breed of directors and actors seemed ready to overthrow the studio system. Coppola, Bogdanovich, Scorsese, Altman, Woody Allen, William Friedkin — they were the new rock stars, and Hollywood, for a while, kowtowed to their whims. And the films got better and better. How could Kael not shine, even explode with joy, while reviewing The Godfather, M*A*S*H, Last Tango in Paris, Chinatown, Taxi Driver, Nashville and others? This was easy stuff to cheerlead.

But the going got rougher when Kael began to lose her objectivity. Some say it was her 1972 review of Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris when she first started going off the rails. She swooned over the metaphysical Brando flick and its extreme sex, but the film divided critics. She coddled certain directors — such as Brian De Palma, Sam Peckinpah and Robert Altman — who became her friends. She could see no wrong in giving them too much credit for a film’s brilliance, even though she spent her early career tearing into other film critics who put too much stock in “auteur theory.” She was peculiarly blind to the merits of, say, Alfred Hitchcock, who she considered a “prestidigitator” who pushed the audience’s buttons, rather than a true artist.

When does a critic cross the line? In Kael’s case, it was probably when she took a six-month leave from The New Yorker to go to Hollywood and try her hand at producing scripts in the early ‘80s. Her blunt nature quickly alienated her from Hollywood execs — the sort of creatively barren hucksters typified by Don Simpson or Tim Robbins’ character in The Player. She soon realized she had less power over movies in Hollywood than she did back in New York.

With her plainspoken prose, Kael managed to piss off New York’s snobby elite critics, as well as feminists, Jews and homosexuals at one time or another. All this gradually chipped away at her reputation — or maybe it’s because she championed movies like De Palma’s Dressed to Kill and Peckinpah’s Convoy beyond all proportion. But Kellow finds another culprit: by the ‘80s the movies just got less interesting. And when the movies were less interesting, Pauline Kael was less interesting. In the end, it was really what kept her going.