Does every cinephile remember when he first read Pauline Kael? I know I do. It came back to me while reading Brian Kellow’s new biography of Kael, which I reviewed for this week’s New York Observer.
It was early 1987, when I was an eleventh grader who had just seen and hated Oliver Stone’s Platoon. (It would win a Best Picture Oscar a few months later.) One of my surprised teachers asked why I hadn’t liked it, and I said it was pretentious and bubbleheaded, and he said, “You should read the New Yorker’s review. She feels the same way.” I can no longer recall that teacher’s name, but—thanks, man!
Looking back at Kael’s Platoon review, I can see how I got hooked on her criticism. She didn’t hate the movie, but she described its flaws with precision and lacerating wit. “Written in 1976, eight years after his war experiences,” she wrote, referring to Stone, “the script is swamped by his divided attentions: he’s trying to give us an account of what it was like to be an infantryman in Vietnam in 1967-68, and to present this in all its immediacy and craziness, but he’s also trying to compose a requiem for that war. The results are overwrought, with too much filtered light, too much poetic license, and too damn much romanticized insanity.”
Kael is someone I quote with embarrassing regularity in my own writing. Even the tagline of this blog, up there since 2005, comes from Kael—it’s the name of her sixth collection of reviews, published in 1980. (In the biography, Kellow says that title was “suggested by a stranger she met at a dinner party in Los Angeles,” and it’s certainly in keeping with the suggestive titles of nearly all her collections.) As with lots of the writers I idolized in my teens, I eventually saw her shortcomings—the hyperbole, the erratic tastes, the bullying, the rambling. But when I re-read her I fall in love with her voice and judgment all over again. How could I not love someone who told a reporter, upon her retirement in 1991, “The prospect of having to sit through another Oliver Stone movie is too much”?
Kellow, too, fell for Kael’s reviews in high school, and he does an excellent job separating her strengths from her weaknesses, both as a critic and a person. The book is full of stories of hilarious, scathing things she said and of things she did that showed a reluctance to apologize or admit error. One story that floored me involves her 1972 review of Sydney Pollack’s Jeremiah Johnson. She wrote that at the end of the movie, Robert Redford, playing a 19th-century trapper, gives an Indian chief the finger. “In that gesture,” she declared, “the moviemakers load him with guilt for what the white Americans have done to the Indians, and, at the same time, ask us to laugh at the gesture, identifying with his realism.” Kellow quotes a letter that Pollack sent Kael after the review appeared, saying he could “only assume that by that point you were so bored with the film that you were half asleep, since there is no way to understand how you could see Johnson giving the finger to the Crow Chief. He quite clearly raises his hand in salute … I have never been so completely misunderstood or misinterpreted as in those last few lines of your review.”
How clearly was Redford saluting? See the screengrab above. Yet not only did The New Yorker never run a correction, but Kael also repeated the error when the review was reprinted in her collection Reeling a few years later, adding only a vague, disingenuous footnote that said in part: “the audience laughed cynically at his salute. This laughter may have influenced my interpretation of his movement.”
I end my review of the biography with a jaw-dropping quote from Gina James, Kael’s daughter, at Kael’s memorial service in 2001. Here’s another quote from the memorial service, one that makes me love her all the more: “She was funny and lethal right up to the end,” said Craig Seligman. “One day when she was near death and I was trying to divert her with chatter about working as an editor, I said, ‘It never ceases to amaze me how many people who call themselves writers actually can’t write.’ And she said, very weakly, ‘Yes—they say things like “It never ceases to amaze me.”’”
Fun fact: At Berkeley in the late 1930s, Kael befriended a painter and poet named Virginia Admiral, and in the ’40s babysat Admiral’s son, Robert De Niro.
Hooked was my first experience with Pauline Kael. I was writing film reviews for the college paper and I was mesmerized. She managed to be smart and accessible at once. She gave context better than anyone - the precisely right context.
Posted by: Juliana | December 02, 2011 at 05:23 PM