Pauline Kael

by Brian Kellow

  As always, Pauline could be counted on not to fall in line with her fellow critics, many of whom found Louis Malle’s latest effort, Au revoir les enfants, among the year’s finest pictures. It was an embroidered account of an episode from Malle’s childhood, when the Catholic boarding school he attended hid a number of Jewish boys among the students—boys who were later uncovered by the Gestapo and sent to Auschwitz. It was a dignified, stately, nobly restrained piece of moviemaking, and the critics, while admiring Malle’s craftsmanship, were also quite moved by the subject matter itself. Malle made no bones about saying to the press that he considered it his finest achievement.

  As always, this sort of serious self-awareness was a red flag to Pauline, who thought that Au revoir les enfants suffered from an overdose of subdued good taste that kept the audience at a steady remove from the story. “The camera is so discreet it always seems about ten feet too far away,” she wrote. She found that Gaspard Manesse, as Julien Quentin, the character Malle based on himself, was a bit of a blank, “directed so that he never engages us; we can’t look into him, or into anyone else.” The end of her review was vintage Pauline, exhorting her readers not to allow themselves to be easily manipulated by Malle’s story:

  Yes, it gets to you by the end. How could it not? But you may feel pretty worn down—by how accomplished it is, and by all the aching, tender shots of Jean [the Jewish boy in hiding]. He’s photographed as if he were a piece of religious art: Christ in his early adolescence. There’s something unseemly about the movie’s obsession with his exotic beauty—as if the French-German Jews had come from the far side of the moon. And does he have to be so brilliant, and a gifted pianist, and courageous? Would the audience not mourn him if he were just an average schmucky kid with pimples?

  The old guard at The New Yorker mostly gave a cold shoulder to the film version of Jay McInerney’s bestselling 1984 paperback original, Bright Lights, Big City, which became a kind of Catcher in the Rye for the coked-up club crowd of 1980s Manhattan. The main character, Jamie, was based on McInerney himself, in the days when he briefly served as a fact-checker at The New Yorker while submerging himself in the downtown disco scene. There were a number of characters lifted directly from the offices of The New Yorker, among them Jamie’s fellow fact-checker Yasu Wade, a character that was a direct hit at Pauline’s good friend Craig Seligman, who had long since left the magazine and was pursing a writing career on the West Coast. (McInerney described Wade/Seligman as “too fastidious to do anything dangerous or dirty. You suspect that his sexual orientation is largely theoretical. He’d take a hot piece of gossip over a warm piece of ass any day of the week.”) Pauline thought the movie was flat and rather humorless, but she couldn’t resist singling out what for her was its high point: John Houseman’s performance as the magazine’s weary editor in chief, based all too clearly on William Shawn. She told friends that Houseman’s pained look was the very essence of William Shawn’s soul.

  Perhaps none of the gifted directors of the 1970s displayed the degree of stagnation, a decade-plus later, that Woody Allen did. With Another Woman, released in the fall of 1988, he demonstrated that his fascination with the remoteness and emotional aridity of Manhattan intellectuals and artists hadn’t receded—or developed. Gena Rowlands played a cold philosophy professor who rents an apartment for the purpose of writing a book; she is distracted by the next-door conversations, through the vent, of a therapist and her patients—one patient in particular, a coming-unglued pregnant woman (Mia Farrow). The professor becomes obsessed with the woman, who gradually leads her to confront the things in life she has missed. The professor was a distant cousin to Geraldine Page’s perfection-obsessed mother in Interiors. But by now, Allen had worn down his concern for these characters to the point where the grooves were off them; his insights now seemed the kind that ’70s college students would come up with after a few hits on the bong. Pauline put it succinctly: “Woody Allen’s picture is meant to be about emotion, but it has no emotion. It’s smooth and high-toned; it’s polished in its nothingness.”

  As always, she preferred off-center comedy to message drama that took itself too seriously. She was intoxicated by Pedro Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, a comedy about sexual chaos in modern Madrid, painted in bold strokes and Day-Glo colors. It was a daring comedy, “a hallucinogenic Feydeau play,” as Pauline described it, and she thought that Almodóvar seemed like “Godard with a human face—a happy face.” But she disliked Barry Levinson’s Rain Man, a story of the relationship between a two-bit bum named Charlie (Tom Cruise) and his brilliant, autistic brother Raymond (Dustin Hoffman). Pauline acknowledged the wit in Hoffman’s performance, but she thought it had “nowhere to go. It becomes a repetitive, boring feat, though the boringness can be construed as fidelity to the role (and masochists can regard it as great acting).” She thought that in Hoffman’s “mind’s eye he’s always watching the audience watch him.” She regarded Tom Cruise as “an actor in the same sense that Robert Taylor was an actor. He’s patented: his knowing that a camera is on him produces nothing but fraudulence.” For dismissing Rain Man as “wet kitsch,” she was flooded with letters accusing her of bigotry toward autistic people.

  In the spring of 1989 Dutton published Pauline’s latest collection of reviews, Hooked, covering the period of July 1985 to June 1988, for which she had received an advance of $17,500, with Billy Abrahams once again her editor. Publishers Weekly complained, “A disquieting note . . . is the insensitive review of the Holocaust documentary Shoah,” but admitted that “on the whole, Kael’s genuine excitement about film sustains the book.” Hooked sold in the neighborhood of 13,250 net copies in hardcover and 1,650 in paperback.

  Blockbuster movies had risen to a position of unprecedented dominance in the film market, and the big one of the summer of 1989 was Tim Burton’s Batman. Pauline loved the thirty-year-old director’s “macabre sensibility, with a cheerfulness that’s infectious,” and she thought that “this powerfully glamorous new Batman, with sets angled and lighted like film noir, goes beyond pulp; it gallops into the cocky unknown.” When a big special-effects-driven picture was executed this well, Pauline did not object to its possibly dwarfing worthy smaller pictures.

  For some time a definite weariness seemed to be coloring Pauline’s weekly reviewing. She hadn’t written a truly surprising, expansive, out-on-the-ledge review since the Shoah controversy three years earlier. In her review of Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War, however, she regained some of her old vitality. It was a movie that allowed her to make the most profound emotional connection she had made in years; despite the marked difference in subject matter, Casualties of War might be considered her Shoeshine of the late ’80s. (She even referenced the De Sica film in the first paragraph of her review of the De Palma.) Based on a horrific crime that had taken place in Vietnam in 1966, Casualties of War depicted a group of American G.I.s who get brutally ambushed by Vietcong. When one of them is killed, their sergeant (Sean Penn) snaps, and hatches a plan to retaliate by abducting a Vietnamese girl and raping her. Casualties of War provided Pauline with an opportunity to go into her long-abandoned confessional mode:

  We in the audience are put in the man’s position: we’re made to feel the awfulness of being ineffectual. This lifelike defeat is central to the movie. (One hot day on my first trip to New York City, I walked past a group of men on a tenement stoop. One of them, in a sweaty sleeveless T-shirt, stood shouting at a screaming, weeping little boy perhaps eighteen months old. The man must have caught a glimpse of my stricken face, because he called out, “You don’t like it lady? Then how do you like this?” And he picked up a bottle of pink soda pop from the sidewalk and poured it on the baby’s head. Wailing sounds, much louder than before, followed me down the street.)

  Pauline thought that Casualties of War showed De Palma plumbing emotional depths that might not have been previously expected of him. She found the picture demonstrated “such seductive, virtuosic control o
f film craft that he can express convulsions in the unconscious.” But the most dazzling dimension of her lengthy review was the connection she made with some of his earlier thrillers. “In essence, it’s feminist,” she wrote—a judgment that seemed aimed directly at the sensibilities of The Village Voice critics:

  I think that in his earlier movies De Palma was always involved in examining (and sometimes satirizing) victimization, but he was often accused of being a victimizer. Some moviegoers (women, especially) were offended by his thrillers; they thought there was something reprehensibly sadistic in his cleverness. He was clever. When people talk about their sex fantasies, their descriptions almost always sound like movies, and De Palma headed right for that linkage: he teased the audience about how susceptible it was to romantic manipulation. Carrie and Dressed to Kill are like lulling erotic reveries that keep getting broken into by scary jokes. He let you know that he was jerking you around and that it was for your amused, childish delight, but a lot of highly vocal people expressed shock. This time, De Palma touches on raw places in people’s reactions to his earlier movies; he gets at the reality that may have made some moviegoers too fearful to enjoy themselves. He goes to the heart of sexual victimization, and he does it with a new authority. The way he makes movies now, it’s as if he were saying, “What is getting older if it isn’t learning more ways that you’re vulnerable?”

  Pauline’s was the most impassioned review that Casualties of War would receive—and she was stunned when she found herself the object of yet another backlash. The Village Voice ran a cover story titled “De Palma’s Latest Outrage.” (The headline was, in fact, a blatant misrepresentation of the article, which happened to be written by Allen Barra, who wrote the newspaper a letter informing readers that the title was not his choice.) None of this controversy, however, helped Casualties of War achieve box-office success—a failure that Pauline took extremely hard.

  Daniel Day-Lewis had broken through in the mid-’80s as a screen actor to be reckoned with, but Pauline found that his performances varied considerably. (She had found him notably lacking in James Ivory’s A Room with a View.) In My Left Foot, the Irish writer-director Jim Sheridan’s life story of Christy Brown, an Irishman born with cerebral palsy who learned to paint with his foot and became an enormously successful artist, writer, and rounder—Day-Lewis won her over. She opened her review with a detailed account of the scene in the picture in which Brown is devastated by the announcement of his beloved teacher (Fiona Shaw) that she is going to marry someone else, which she described as perhaps “the most emotionally wrenching scene I’ve ever experienced at the movies. The greatness of Day-Lewis’s performance is that he pulls you inside Christy Brown’s frustration and rage (and his bottomless thirst). There’s nothing soft or maudlin about this movie’s view of Christy.” She found Day-Lewis possessed of the sensual, imaginative daring that she loved in Laurence Olivier, and she compared his performance with Olivier’s as Richard III. Day-Lewis won the New York Film Critics Circle Best Actor prize for My Left Foot, and Pauline was seated next to him at the awards presentation, held at the Algonquin Hotel. He was terribly shy, but Pauline worked hard to bring him out, patting him on the hand and asking him questions until he was smiling and quite animated.

  In August, Pauline attended a family reunion at her sister Anne’s house in Berkeley. She continued to have great affection for Anne, who had recently retired from Lowell High School after a long and distinguished teaching career there. The years had improved the relationship between her and Rose somewhat, but they were still anything but close.

  While in Berkeley, Pauline connected with her old friend from the Cinema Guild days, Linda Allen. Pauline struck Allen as being a little heavier than she had remembered, with slightly hunched shoulders and noticeably less energy. But, as she wrote in an unpublished essay about Pauline, “The wide eyes still miss nothing.” It was Gina who had changed more, Allen thought: she looked “surprisingly unlike herself as a girl, especially with her spacious, curved, pure-looking forehead covered with bangs.... Very different from the fragile, quiet dancer and child artist; still an artist, though, and definitely shy.”

  There was a reason that Pauline seemed less robust to Allen. For some time she had been feeling increasingly fatigued and had had a great deal of trouble keeping her balance, especially when she was walking against a strong wind. In New York she had fallen on the street a number of times, breaking her nose more than once. The tremor in her hands had intensified over the years, but whenever she consulted her doctors they had assured her it was nothing more than a benign tremor—no cause for alarm. Friends were slow to notice her symptoms, partly because she had always had a certain fluttery, birdlike quality, especially when she was having an intense reaction to something. By late 1989 she realized she could no longer maintain the illusion that there was nothing seriously wrong with her: Every instinct told her otherwise.

  She consulted another doctor. This time, she mentioned that her tremor would sometimes surface in one hand, sometimes in the other. The doctor, concerned, sent her to a neurologist, whose tests confirmed what she had feared for some time: She had Parkinson’s disease. Her neurologist explained to her that unlike other degenerative conditions that attack the central nervous system, such as Lou Gehrig’s, Parkinson’s was often quite responsive to treatment—particularly in the case of elder onset—and that she might be able to manage a more or less normal life for a number of years. Still, the news was a terrible blow to her. Until she had reached her sixties, she had had few health concerns. To find herself suddenly forced to focus on her own fragile condition was an exceedingly difficult thing for a woman who had often shot through life feeling invincible.

  In October 1989 Pauline invited Allen Barra and his wife, Jonelle, to attend a screening, but the film was so poor that she decided against reviewing it. She invited the Barras out to dinner at a Chinese restaurant on Eighth Avenue, and as they were sitting at a window table, Pauline looked up to see a man knifed in the middle of the street. The man fell to the ground, and Barra went out to stay with him until the police and ambulance arrived. Barra remembered that Pauline “was cool the entire time. Didn’t say a word. Gina told me afterward that it shook her so badly that she couldn’t function for a couple of days. That cemented her loathing of New York. I don’t know how many times she said, ‘Oh, dearie, it would be so nice to see you later on in the day, because I just can’t stand it in this awful city.’ ”

  By now there was another new actress to add to her pantheon. She thought that Diane Keaton, forgiven at last for Reds, had hit her stride in movies ranging from Crimes of the Heart to Baby Boom. Debra Winger’s career already seemed to be fading, something that disappointed Pauline terribly. She liked Christine Lahti, Rae Dawn Chong, Ellen Barkin, Lesley Anne Warren, Pamela Reed, and the beautiful and gifted Michelle Pfeiffer, whose talent had first impressed Pauline in Natica Jackson on PBS-TV. When Stephen Frears was preparing to film Dangerous Liaisons, he had settled on Kelly McGillis for the pivotal role of the cruelly manipulated Mme. de Tourvel. Pauline was already displeased with him for having cast Glenn Close as the scheming Marquise de Merteuil (an opinion she would change when the film was released), and when she went out to dinner with him suggested several other actresses for the part of Mme. de Tourvel—among them, Pfeiffer. She sent him a VHS tape of Natica Jackson, and Frears, won over, gave the actress the role. She gave a beautiful performance, as she did in her new film, Steve Kloves’s The Fabulous Baker Boys. Pauline hailed Pfeiffer’s arrival with her usual flair: “With Pfeiffer in deep-red velvet crawling on the piano like a long-legged Kitty-cat and sliding down to be closer to the pianist, something new has been achieved in torrid comedy.”

  In December a film opened that would usher in one of the most profitable and influential movie trends of the 1990s: Disney’s animated feature version of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Little Mermaid. Pauline, who had little patience for most of the enormously popular Disney featur
es of the 1930s,’40s, and ’50s, was delighted that her grandson, Will, was more drawn to exotic, exciting adventure stories. She made short work of The Little Mermaid, which she found no less treacly than vintage Disney had been:

  Are we trying to put kids into some sort of moral-aesthetic safe house? Parents seem desperate for harmless family entertainment. Probably they don’t mind this movie’s being vapid, because the whole family can share it, and no one is offended. We’re caught in a culture warp. Our children are flushed with pleasure when we read them Where the Wild Things Are or Roald Dahl’s sinister stories. Kids are ecstatic watching videos of The Secret of NIMH and The Dark Crystal. Yet here comes the press telling us that The Little Mermaid is “due for immortality.” People are made to feel that this stale pastry is what they should be taking their kids to, that it’s art for children. And when they see the movie they may believe it, because this Mermaid is just a slightly updated version of what their parents took them to. They’ve been imprinted with Disney-style kitsch.

  The Little Mermaid took in more than $100 million at the box office and achieved a merchandising success that Walt Disney himself might only have dreamed of, opening the door for the studio’s astonishing resurgence in the 1990s.

  The following year brought many pictures she liked very much, including two released at the end of 1989, Paul Mazursky’s Enemies: A Love Story and Bruce Beresford ’s Driving Miss Daisy, the latter inadvertently causing her yet more trouble in the by-now advanced era of political correctness. Driving Miss Daisy had enjoyed great success as an Off-Broadway play by Alfred Uhry, about the growing friendship between a cantankerous Southern Jewish woman and her cagey, independent-minded black chauffeur. She praised Beresford for underplaying the “coziness and slightness” of the original material, and at the voting of the New York Film Critics Circle in December 1989, Driving Miss Daisy was one of four films—the others being Enemies: A Love Story, The Fabulous Baker Boys, and My Left Foot—that Pauline supported for the major awards.