Pauline Kael

by Brian Kellow

  An Unmarried Woman was the story of an upper-middle-class woman (Jill Clayburgh) who discovers that her stockbroker husband, Martin (Michael Murphy), has fallen in love with another woman and is leaving her. In one scene that particularly resonated with audiences at the time, Erica walks away from Martin dry-eyed and shell-shocked, as the camera swirls around her in one continuous take—until she vomits in a trash can. It was a movie that put the zeitgeist center stage: Erica’s friend Sue (Pat Quinn) observes, “It was so much easier in the ’60s. Vietnam. Assassination. The Black Panthers. There was a helluva lot to do. You can’t even find a decent cause these days.” And there is a revealing exchange between Erica and her precocious teenage daughter, Patti (Lisa Lucas):

  PATTI: I mean, everybody I know is either miserable or divorced. I don’t want that.

  ERICA: There’s a lot of happily married couples.

  PATTI: Name three.

  ERICA: I’ll have to think about it.

  Michael Murphy didn’t grasp the impact of certain aspects of the script when he first read and rehearsed it. “We thought that Martin pissing Erica off was just sort of a mechanism to get her off on her own and dishing with the girls. But the weight of that marriage became more prominent than any of us thought it would. It took on some weight of its own. Sometimes with movies that happens.” After An Unmarried Woman was released, Murphy got up one Sunday and walked down Third Avenue to the theater where the film was playing. “There’s this line, and they’re mostly women. I thought, Holy Toledo, what’s going on here? And that’s when I realized something culturally was happening. For many years, both genders hated me. I was the first of the whiny yuppies, you know? I had women wrinkling their noses at me. There were guys who looked down at me. My own agent called me and said, ‘Don’t expect you’re going to get a lot of work from this.’”

  Pauline found the film “funny and buoyant besides. It’s an enormously friendly, soft-edged picture,” and she loved the performance of Jill Clayburgh, whose “floating, not-quite-sure not-quite-here quality is just right”; perhaps it was even appropriate that “that camera isn’t in love with her—she doesn’t seem lighted from within.” She did agree with her fellow critics, however, that some of the movie’s points were hit a little too glancingly. She thought that Mazursky was “a superb shaggy screenwriter and rarely less than deft, but he touches so many women’s-liberation bases that you begin to feel virtuous, as if you’d been passing out leaflets for McGovern.”

  The picture became problematic once it introduced a too-perfect man for Erica, in the person of Saul Kaplan (Alan Bates), a smart, sexy, understanding, and successful painter who wants to spirit her away to Vermont for the summer. But the movie ends with Erica not sure that Saul is the answer; she prefers to continue exploring her own single status. Surprisingly, Pauline objected less to Saul’s perfection than to the fact that Erica hesitates to be with him; she felt that at that point in the story, the audience lost interest in what happened to Erica, because it was difficult to tell “whether she’s struggling toward independence or embracing the generalized anxiety and dissatisfaction in the culture and sinking into it.” She suspected that the director’s “ambiguous ending, which is a way of postponing his decision, suggests that he can’t get through to his own creation. He doesn’t know what’s going on in Erica’s head.” Perhaps James Broughton had been right all those years ago—Pauline was in many ways an Ibsenist at heart.

  There was a reason that Pauline’s enthusiasm had grown shriller, more insistent, in the recent years: Outstanding movies with a lively, original sensibility had been coming along much more infrequently than they had just a few years earlier. The life was seeping out of the film movement of the 1970s, and she knew it. All the more reason, then, to intensify her advocacy for the movies she loved, even for those that she thought simply showed promise: In the new, blockbuster-oriented Hollywood, artists were having a harder time than ever before.

  Around this time, her judgment began to seem as if it had gotten knocked slightly askew, leading her to praise films that struck many readers as being something less than she claimed. She appeared at times to be reviewing the sensibility behind the film rather than the end result. “She at that point in her movie criticism was becoming a kineticist,” observed Richard Albarino. “She loved the kinetics of movies. She was a sensualist. That kinetic style of film-making bowled her over—movies that were exciting in that way, with real feeling behind them.” She seemed to feel that if she concentrated hard enough, she could transform her reader’s opinions.

  Toward the end of her 1977–78 New Yorker stint, she reviewed two films that appealed to that sense. One was James Toback’s latest, Fingers, a drama about the bizarre duality that marks the life of Jimmy Fingers, a debt collector who dreams of becoming a concert pianist. While other reviewers gave the unruly film mostly negative notices, Pauline raved about it. She loved the idea that “Jimmy needs to be an exciting, violent, emotional man, a man who’s at war with himself, who has so much going on that he’s shooting sparks, hitting highs and lows.” Even if much of the film seemed “still locked up in the writer-director’s head,” she loved it because he showed every sign of having “true moviemaking fever.” In describing one of her favorite scenes—one in which the prizefighter Dreems (played by Toback’s close friend Jim Brown) knocks two girls’ heads together—she abandoned all restraint: “The shock is in the speed of Dreems’s action: the film views him not as thinking fast but as not needing to think—as not being sicklied o’er with the white man’s pale cast of thought.” George Malko remembered vividly the impact it had on her in the theater: “The only time I ever felt Pauline levitate in the seat next to me was when Jim Brown takes the two young girls and cracks their heads together. Pauline gasped, ‘Oooh!’ and literally left her seat.”

  In her review of Fingers, Pauline had written, “Normality doesn’t interest Toback. He’s playing the literary adolescent’s game of wanting to go crazy so he can watch his own reaction.” No doubt she felt she was paying a compliment to a kindred spirit, but her remark angered the director even more than the “Jewish prince” comment in her review of The Gambler, and once more, he called her on it. “You refer to the literary adolescent’s way of playing crazy,” Toback snapped at her. “I went clinically insane for eight days under LSD, at nineteen, as you well know. It was the seminal event of my life. And you, who have never experienced insanity, don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. And for you to deliberately throw in a line like that is embarrassing and lightweight and not worthy of you.” Pauline was quite taken aback: By now Toback was a close friend and a regular companion at screenings.

  Another film that brought her kineticist’s reaction was Brian De Palma’s latest, The Fury. Like Carrie, it dealt with a form of telekinesis, this time belonging to two young people who share a psychic gift and as a result are being used as pawns by the U.S. government, which plots to employ them as secret intelligence weapons. Pauline shrugged off The Fury’s ramshackle plot and gushed that it went “so far beyond anything in his last film, Carrie, that that now seems like child’s play . . . De Palma is one of the few directors in the sound era to make a horror film that is so visually compelling that a viewer seems to have entered a mythic night world.... We can hear the faint, distant sound of De Palma cackling with pleasure.” Again, she found few critics who agreed with her, let alone shared her unrestrained enthusiasm. When she wrote, “No Hitchcock thriller was ever so intense, went so far, or had so many ‘classic’ sequences,” even many of her die-hard fans wondered if she might temporarily have gone off the rails.

  At a lecture Pauline had delivered at Lincoln Center in the 1960s, she had been introduced as “the author of I Lost It at the Movies.” John Simon, sitting in the audience, had loudly intoned, “What she lost was her taste.” Now, many were wondering if he might not have had a point. What her readers had no way of knowing—perhaps even she did not know—was that she was attempting to shed a
layer of skin. Her passion for the movies had reached another level, one that would take her in another direction entirely.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Several of the big studio films released in the summer of 1978 crystallized for Pauline a trend she had seen building in recent years: People she talked with suddenly seemed wary of the visceral side of films. The edginess, the eruptions of violence and volatile emotions that had made the Godfather films, Straw Dogs, Taxi Driver, and Carrie among the most-talked-about movies of the decade now seemed anathema to many in the audience. The counterculture spirit that had once fed some of the best moviemaking was all but drying up. Ever since the fall of Saigon in the spring of 1975, Vietnam had been rapidly fading in the public memory as a meaningless mistake that was best forgotten; to many, those who had served in the war were now viewed less as tragic victims than as unfortunate losers. College campuses were no longer a center of any kind of organized dissent; instead, membership in fraternities and sororities—the essence of comfort-seeking conformity—had spiked; the soft-edged Bee Gees songs from Saturday Night Fever could be heard blasting from the upstairs windows of every Sigma Chi house in the country. A wave of complacency had swept over American life, making its presence felt on the screen, both large and small: On television, the new “adult” era ushered in by Room 222, All in the Family, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show had been dwarfed by feel-good nostalgia comedies such as Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley, and bubble-headed farces such as Three’s Company.

  In terms of her own writing life, Pauline felt that the recent social changes in America had helped to create an unhealthy moviegoing climate in which audiences flocked to tame, tidy films and avoided messy, provocative ones. She expressed her concerns in her opening essay of the fall of 1978, “Fear of Movies,” in which she posited her theory that “Discriminating moviegoers want the placidity of nice art—of movies tamed so that they are no more arousing than what used to be called polite theatre.” Among the biggest offenders were Warren Beatty’s Heaven Can Wait, which earned some of the year’s best reviews but which she described as having “no desire but to please, and that it’s only compulsiveness; it’s so timed and pleated and smoothed that it’s sliding right off the screen.” She was stunned that the summer-movie audience turned up in relatively small numbers for three of her favorites, Sam Peckinpah’s Convoy, Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz, and Irvin Kershner’s Eyes of Laura Mars. Pauline’s defense of Convoy, however, made her an easy target for her critics:

  The trucks give the performances in this movie, and they go through changes: when the dust rises around them on rough backcountry roads, they’re like sea beasts splashing spume; when two of them squeeze a little police car between their tanklike armored bodies, they’re insect titans. The whole movie is a prankish road dance, and the convoy itself is a protest without a cause: the drivers are just griped in general and blowing off steam. They want the recreation of a protest.

  But Pauline was unrepentant. She thought that both Convoy and Eyes of Laura Mars, a thriller about a murderer who stabs the eyes of his victims, displayed what to her was the most important quality a filmmaker could have: moviemaking fever. Unlike some of her colleagues, Pauline refused to see Laura Mars as any kind of feminist commentary; in fact, it was her refusal to take a “topical” view of movies of the time—such as hailing Looking for Mr. Goodbar and An Unmarried Woman as major advances for women’s films simply because they dealt with issues of contemporary concern—that was partly the reason that so many of those connected with The Village Voice despised her writing. Her enthusiasm for Convoy and Laura Mars fueled the mounting criticism that she was an advocate of sensationalism in the movies: that being turned on as an audience member was more important to her than any real cogency in the writing or direction—the very thing she had been railing about back in the sixties in essays such as “Are Movies Going to Pieces?” However unfair that disparagement may have been, it was probably inevitable for a critic who, in the words of the film historian Jeanine Basinger, “took risks—she was not careful. She was bold—and her boldness made people take shots at her.” But it was an accusation that would cling to her in the years to come.

  “Fear of Movies” also included Pauline’s sharp observations of Woody Allen’s latest, Interiors, a study of a well-educated, upper-middle-class WASP family of New Yorkers that has been unraveling for years. The film’s dialogue, which managed to be both arid and archly literary, and the austere, earth-toned production design and conspicuously somber, sedate direction and photography, along with its concerns with the problems of a group of intellectually striving Manhattanites, all added up to a movie that seemed to Pauline as if its director was desperately begging to be taken seriously. She wondered, “How can Woody Allen present in a measured, lugubriously straight manner the same sorts of tinny anxiety discourse that he generally parodies?” To her, the film’s presentation of a WASP dilemma was a mask for classic Jewish concerns. “Surely at root the family problem is Jewish: it’s not the culture in general that imposes these humanly impossible standards of achievement—they’re a result of the Jewish fear of poverty and persecution and the Jewish reverence for learning.” Interiors was “a handbook of art-film mannerisms,” and she feared that in the end, Allen’s obsession with repressive good taste “is just what may keep him from making great movies.” (In this, she turned out to be amazingly prescient.) Pauline was delighted to have the chance to overturn the “official” verdict of Penelope Gilliatt, who had reviewed Interiors in The New Yorker only weeks earlier, saying of Allen, “This droll piece of work is his most majestic so far.”

  Pauline was also displeased with Robert Altman’s latest, A Wedding. The movie had probably come about for all the wrong reasons: While Altman was shooting Three Women, a reporter from Mother Jones had asked him what he was going to film next; exasperated with her vapid questions, he recalled, he answered, “A wedding.... I’m taking this crew, and we’ll be doing weddings. Somebody gets married, and we’ll go and film it. I was really shitty. About that time we broke for lunch, and I went into this motel room with two or three other staff, and I said, ‘You know, that’s not a bad idea.’”

  In A Wedding, it appears that Altman wanted to accomplish something similar to what he had achieved in Nashville—a revealing inside look at a bedrock American institution. Like Nashville it featured a big, attractive cast (including Carol Burnett, Vittorio Gassman, and Mia Farrow), but it had too many characters—forty-eight compared with Nashville’s twenty-four—and the film’s tone this time was sour, not generous, without Nashville’s constant surprises and twists. To Pauline, it was “like a busted bag of marbles—people are running every way at once.” She objected to its condescending tone: Altman, she felt, “doesn’t like the characters on the screen; he’s taking potshots at them, but he doesn’t show us what he’s got against them.” The movie’s cynical tone saddened her, and her disappointment in Altman was crystallized by her choice of a title for the review—“Forty-eight Characters in Search of a Director.”

  Pauline’s growing disappointment in the movies she had been seeing had an odd, dispiriting effect on those who loyally read her each week. While there was truth to the accusation that her writing at times became hyperbolic, those reviews from the early to mid-’70s continued to convey an enthusiasm that was addictive. By the fall of 1978, however, many of her readers may have felt that they were experiencing withdrawal from a powerful drug. The great champion of the creative flowering of earlier in the decade took it personally that that period seemed all but over, and at times, her writing showed it.

  She was, however, in excellent form with her review of Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata. It was a prestige project, a work by an acknowledged master that also featured a topical theme—the bitter conflict of a mother and daughter. Autumn Sonata told the story of Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman, in her first film with the director), a famed Swedish concert pianist who goes to visit her daughter, Eva (Liv Ullmann), married to
a country parson. The daughter is a study in pent-up rage, which she blames on her mother’s years of neglect.

  The critics, many of them impressed by the mere idea of a collaboration between the two Bergmans, were generally respectful of the film, although most of the praise was qualified; Andrew Sarris, for one, admitted that at some point he “began tuning out on Eva’s tirade.” Autumn Sonata was the kind of story Pauline was temperamentally disposed to dislike. She resented that Bergman presented Eva’s point of view “as the truth. Not just the truth as she nearsightedly sees it but the truth.” The audience was given no real opportunity to see Charlotte’s point of view, and as a result, the movie seemed like a long, shrill whine. “It’s like the grievances of someone who has just gone into therapy—Mother did this to me, she did that to me, and that and that and that,” Pauline wrote. “Eva is vengeful and overexplicit and humorless; she takes no responsibility for anything. Without any recognition of the one-sidedness, Ingmar Bergman lays it on so thick—makes it all so grueling—that we have to reject it.”

  It was unquestionably a genuine reaction to the movie’s point of view—but it could hardly have escaped the attention of those close to her that the relationship between Charlotte and Eva bore certain resemblances to that between Pauline and Gina. Pauline’s daughter had developed into a lovely woman who looked far younger than thirty and had retained her gentle, soft-spoken manner. (Pauline’s friend the writer Martha Sherman Bacon observed in a letter that Gina resembled a Gainsborough portrait, A Child of Quality in Peasant Dress.) Mother and daughter’s relationship had had its fractious moments at various points in the past few years. By now Gina had given up dance and become seriously interested in painting. Outwardly, Pauline seemed very supportive of her work. But the silver cord remained as tightly attached as ever, and Pauline could commit herself to Gina’s creative interests only to the point that they didn’t threaten her own needs for her daughter’s time and attention. Simultaneously, she encouraged Gina and worried that she might abandon her. Many friends felt that if Gina had expressed a desire to pursue a career as an artist elsewhere, Pauline would have done her best to dissuade her from it. She had simply grown too accustomed to having her daughter close by. Carrie Rickey remembered a phone conversation between her own mother and Pauline in the mid-’70s in which Pauline stressed how important it was for mothers to meddle in their daughters’ lives and set them on the right path.