Pauline Kael

by Brian Kellow

  Pauline had stumbled through the year, mostly indifferent to the films she was seeing, until the summer brought Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, the story of a sounds-effects specialist (John Travolta) who one night witnesses a man driving off a bridge and into a river. The man in the car turns out to be the governor of Pennsylvania, who was preparing a campaign for the presidency; he dies, but the hero manages to rescue a girl who was also in the car, and soon the two of them find themselves embroiled in a case of high-level conspiracy. It was, as Pauline noted, a movie that had overtones of political events of recent years—ranging from Chappaquiddick to Watergate. Several critics dismissed it as a routine takeoff on Blow-Up, but Pauline found it to be “the first movie in which De Palma has stripped away the cackle and the glee.” It was “hallucinatory, and it has a dreamlike clarity and inevitability, but you’ll never make the mistake of thinking that it’s only a dream. Compared with Blow Out, even the good pictures that have opened this year look dowdy.” And then she took one of her giant steps, as if defying the critics who attacked her for being hyperbolic: “I think De Palma has sprung to the place that Altman achieved with films such as McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Nashville and that Coppola reached with the two Godfather movies—that is, to the place where genre is transcended and what we’re moved by is an artist’s vision.” Despite its virtues, Blow Out didn’t receive particularly strong reviews, and it muddled along at the box office.

  The most heralded actress’s performance of the summer left her cold—Meryl Streep in Karel Reisz’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman. She had admired Streep on the New York stage, particularly as a comedienne, and written warmly of her performance as Linda in The Deer Hunter. But Pauline generally preferred actors who conveyed some kind of ripe sensuality, inflected with a certain craziness or messiness. This was particularly true of her favorite female stars, from Bette Davis to Debra Winger. She had already pegged Streep as a highly cerebral actress, and wrote: “We never really get into the movie because, as Sarah, Meryl Streep gives an immaculate, technically accomplished performance, but she isn’t mysterious. She’s pallid and rather glacial. . . . Meryl Streep’s technique doesn’t add up to anything. We’re not fascinated by Sarah; she’s so distanced from us that all we can do is observe how meticulous Streep—and everything else about the movie—is.”

  Pauline was just beginning to feel that she had recovered from the wounds inflicted by Renata Adler’s essay when she was hit by another attack—one that was, in its way, even more unsettling.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  It was the unlikeliest of films that caused Pauline so much difficulty in late 1981. George Cukor’s Rich and Famous was an anachronism for the early ’80s—a new version of John Van Druten’s musty Broadway comedy Old Acquaintance, about the tumultuous friendship of two women writers, one with a serious literary reputation, the other the author of trashy bestsellers. The play had been previously filmed in 1943, with Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins as the battling friends. Now it had been updated, spanning the period from 1959 to 1981, with Jacqueline Bisset as the serious one and Candice Bergen, fresh from her surprising comedic success in Alan J. Pakula’s Starting Over, as the trashmonger. Rich and Famous earned a certain niche in film history because, at eighty-one, George Cukor was the oldest director on record to have helmed a major studio picture.

  What perplexed Pauline most about the film was her strong feeling that the entire movie was suffused with a gay sensibility. This was fine in the campier scenes, in which an outrageously over-the-top Bergen was used “almost as if she were a big, goosey female impersonator,” in Pauline’s words. The problem came in the scenes in which the picture strained to take a serious look at why Bisset’s character was so bottled up creatively and emotionally. One sequence in particular bothered Pauline. In it, Bisset is picked up by a hot young boy, takes him back to her room at the Algonquin, and watches with anxious lust as he slowly removes his clothes. “She begins to kiss his abdomen passionately, gratefully,” wrote Pauline. “It’s gruesomely silly.... This picture might have been made by young hustlers.” At the end of her review, she offered, “Rich and Famous isn’t camp, exactly; it’s more like a homosexual fantasy. Bisset’s affairs, with their masochistic overtones, are creepy, because they don’t seem like what a woman would get into.”

  Pauline didn’t foresee that her remarks would upset her readers, and perhaps if they had been written by a gay man, they might not have. But coming from a heterosexual woman, they were perceived by many as hostile; by 1981, the lines in the war for sexual equality had been drawn much more boldly than they had been before. In identifying Bisset’s character with what she thought of as the masochistic side of gay cruising, she misstepped by failing to explain herself adequately: She was speaking specifically of the gay men she knew for whom sex and genuine intimacy were two different things. For Pauline, casual sex onscreen didn’t need to be accompanied by an explanation or apology, or loads of sober, melancholy rationale—this was exactly what had disturbed her about Looking for Mr. Goodbar. But her comment about Bisset’s affairs was perilously close to the one she had made about the Rod Steiger character in The Sergeant, and it appeared to some of her offended readers that her thinking on gay issues hadn’t advanced since 1968. Many of her gay readers might once have unquestioningly been seduced by her language and the force of her personality; now many of them demanded accountability.

  The gay press was quick to register its outrage, with a full-scale attack launched by Stuart Byron in The Village Voice. “However much male gay life has followed promiscuous patterns not available to straights until the advent of the postpill paradise, the gay fantasy has always been exactly the same as the straight fantasy: love and happiness with one person forever.” The Voice, of course, had long had it in for her: it was the home base of Andrew Sarris, and the paper’s critics deplored the fact that Pauline didn’t toe the line on feminism and gay rights—and certain staff members even felt that she had never fully embraced her own Jewishness. “The reason the Voice hated her was that she wasn’t politically correct,” said David Edelstein. “It’s as simple as that. They didn’t consider her tastes particularly feminist. De Palma they found unbearable. They were cultural commissars there.”

  Many of her friends leaped to her defense. James Wolcott was stunned by the backlash from her Rich and Famous review. “Pauline was so advanced on gay things in her sensibility, in the people she had around her,” he said. “The Stuart Byron thing bothered her because she knew it wasn’t true, and when something like that was said other people would pick up on it. She would say, ‘Haven’t they seen what a lousy movie it is?’ ‘You’re going to make this movie the basis of your stand about gay portrayals and sensibility—this thing?’ It was a sore point.”

  Pauline believed in giving readers a precise description of the emotions a film generated in her, even if the words she used to describe them were tough, even coarse. Years earlier, when she had used the phrase “fag phantom of the opera” to describe Rod Steiger’s role in No Way to Treat a Lady, she had chosen the term both for rhythm and to convey the cheap, low-camp nature of the character. Likewise, shortly after her Rich and Famous review appeared, she wrote about Pixote, Hector Babenco’s superb film about the horrible lives of child criminals in Brazil. Describing a character played by Jorge Juliao, she wrote that he was “a soft creature, flamingly nelly—an imitation of a young girl without parody.” Her use of the word “nelly” may have rankled William Shawn—but again, it was the word she thought best conveyed her feeling for the character. “Effeminate” would have been too tame, too predictable. A key to her profound connection with readers had always been her rich use of the vernacular; she wrote in the current jargon, and she thought her readers should be able to take it. “If I make these jokes,” she told her friend Daryl Chin, “it’s because I have so many gay friends and I assume they all understand.”

  While some movie fans were offended by her review of Rich and Famous on behalf o
f George Cukor—he was widely known to be gay, and it was considered that she had disrespected him by painting Rich and Famous as a gay fantasy—it was mostly her army of avid gay readers who felt that she had betrayed them, and they vented their anger in letters that poured into the offices of The New Yorker. Pauline was disturbed by the violence of some of them, and to those angered readers whose letters and phone calls she answered, she explained that she had simply been trying to point out the difference in nuance between gay and heterosexual encounters.

  During the creative and social upheaval of the 1960s and ’70s, Pauline’s tough-mindedness and intellectual daring had been a perfect match for what was taking place in the movies. But times had changed. Ronald Reagan had been elected on a platform that effectively included a war on liberalism, and the economic downturn and perceived lack of leadership in the Jimmy Carter administration had helped create an enormous swing to the right in U.S. politics. The protection of corporate interests was paramount on Reagan’s list of concerns, and Pauline constantly fretted that the new, money-driven culture ushered in by his election was having a devastating effect on the movies.

  Yet, while what wound up on the screen was becoming blander and safer, society was, paradoxically, becoming more polarized, and many people were becoming much more militant about the issues that concerned them. The days when a mainstream publication such as Time could characterize homosexuality as an affliction were long gone. With the impending AIDS crisis, which would devastate the world in the 1980s and ’90s, many publications would find it a delicate matter to criticize gay subject matter or sensibility on any level. The zeitgeist was changing—and the reaction to Pauline’s review of Rich and Famous was an indication that it was changing in ways that were alien to her values.

  For her part, Pauline made no effort to moderate her use of astringent language just because some of her readers objected to it. In a November review of Milos Forman’s Ragtime, she stunned some readers with her description of the director’s concept of the Gibson girl Evelyn Nesbit, played by Elizabeth McGovern: “Forman appears to see Evelyn as some sort of open-mouthed retard.” Again she was drawing from ordinary American speech—“retard” was a common expression for anyone who engaged in dull, stupid behavior—and therefore considered the term acceptable.

  At the end of 1981 she surprised everyone with an ecstatic review for Herbert Ross’s Pennies from Heaven, calling it “the most emotional movie musical I’ve ever seen.” Based on the BBC TV series, Pennies from Heaven was an emotionally jarring look at the quietly desperate life of an Illinois sheet-music salesman, played by the comedian Steve Martin. The novelty of the movie, which captured in amazing detail the sadly evocative paintings of Edward Hopper, was that the characters lip-synched to popular recordings from the ’30s to express themselves. “Despite its use of Brechtian devices,” Pauline wrote, “Pennies from Heaven doesn’t allow you to distance yourself. You’re thrust into the characters’ emotional extremes; you’re right in front of the light that’s shining from their eyes. And you see the hell they go through for sex and money.” Herbert Ross was not a director for whom she ever had much regard, but this time she thought he had surpassed himself: “There’s something new going on—something thrilling—when the characters in a musical are archetypes yet are intensely alive.... This picture shows that the talent to make great movie musicals is out there, waiting.” She pushed hard for the movie in her review, because she had a strong sense that the studio, MGM, wouldn’t know what to do with it, and she was right: Pennies from Heaven suffered from a halfhearted marketing campaign and failed completely at the box office.

  The movie on which her fans were most eager to read her verdict was Warren Beatty’s Reds, which had a splashy opening in December. She did not recant her opinion that it was a mistake for Beatty to have taken on such an ambitious project—the story of the American journalist John Reed and his eventual undoing as a pawn in the Bolshevik Revolution—but she admitted that it was a film made with “an enormous amount of dedication and intelligence. It’s absorbing, and you feel good will toward it.” Nevertheless, she felt that Reds didn’t work, largely because Beatty hadn’t decided which aspects of his sprawling story interested him most. She loved the interviews with survivors from John Reed’s era—including Henry Miller, Hamilton Fish, Rebecca West, Dora Russell, and Adela Rogers St. John—but felt the problem was that they were “all much peppier and more vital than the actors.”

  One of the biggest difficulties Pauline had with Reds was the casting of Diane Keaton, Beatty’s girlfriend at the time, as Reed’s fellow journalist and revolutionary, and his wife, Louise Bryant. She felt the movie did Bryant a disservice by presenting her as “a tiresome, pettishly hostile woman,” and that it never really grappled with the question of how talented or how opportunistic Bryant was. “It takes Keaton a long time to get any kind of bearings; at the start her nervous speech patterns are anachronistic—she seems to be playing a premature post-hippie neurotic,” Pauline wrote.

  She admired much about Beatty’s performance in the film, finding him “remarkably subtle in the way he tunes in to whoever is in a scene with him,” though she felt that he was still trying to sell his nice-boy image to the audience; he was too “bewildered, shaggy, eager” and didn’t tap enough into the darker side of John Reed. In the end, Reds was “extremely traditional, and in movies traditional means derivative . . . [it is] the least radical, the least innovative epic you can imagine.”

  Her review of Reds led to yet another showdown with Shawn. In order to describe the relationship between John Reed and Louise Bryant as Beatty had conceived it, Pauline had written that the movie showed Reed to be “pussywhipped.” Shawn tried to get her to change it to “henpecked,” which she laughed at and rejected. The argument went back and forth between them, until Shawn finally told her in no uncertain terms that “pussywhipped” would not be printed in The New Yorker. (It’s a shame, in a way, since many who saw Reds must agree that it’s the only word to describe the onscreen relationship.)

  There is no surviving correspondence from The New Yorker that addresses the question of whether Pauline should have been allowed to review Reds, given her history with Beatty and Paramount. Certainly Shawn must have considered the potential conflict carefully before allowing her to go ahead. “There was no way that she was going to be able to see Reds with an open mind,” said James Toback. “And she actually hit Warren, in a semiconscious or unconscious desire to stick to him, by attacking Diane Keaton’s performance. It was her way of saying, ‘You, who of all men should know how to bring out the best in a woman, have taken your girlfriend, the female star, and come up with a performance that’s not good.’ If she was going to say something to nail him, that was it.” Roy Blount, Jr., remembered going with Pauline to the screening of Reds and seeing the Paramount publicists hovering fearfully around her. “Oh, God, they were so damned nervous. It was in this little bitty screening room in New York, and they were just sort of hanging on her for a reaction.” Reds had substantial earnings as one of the Christmas season’s big prestige pictures, but its eventual take of around $32 million was not quite enough to earn back its staggering production cost—the result that Pauline had predicted when Beatty was developing the project at Paramount.

  At the voting for the 1981 New York Film Critics Circle, Pauline did her usual campaigning for her favorites. For the Best Picture prize, she favored Blow Out, Pennies from Heaven, and Atlantic City; for Best Director, Brian De Palma for Blow Out, Walter Hill for Southern Comfort, and Louis Malle for Atlantic City. Her picks for Best Actor included Burt Lancaster for Atlantic City and John Travolta for Blow Out, plus Andre Gregory for My Dinner with Andre (cowritten by and costarring William Shawn’s son, Wallace). For Best Actress her finalists included Faye Dunaway (Mommie Dearest), Bernadette Peters (Pennies from Heaven), and Marília Pera (Pixote). Lancaster was the only one of her choices who won in the end—and she was especially chagrined to see the Best Picture award go
to Reds.

  Throughout 1982 there was still the occasional marvelous personal film that she loved writing about and did her best to champion. One was Alan Parker’s marital drama Shoot the Moon, about which she observed, “I’m a little afraid to say how good I think Shoot the Moon is—I don’t want to set up the kind of bad magic that might cause people to say they were led to expect so much that they were disappointed.” Bo Goldman, whose script for Melvin and Howard she had admired so much, had come through again, with a story that wasn’t “just about marriage; it’s about the family that is created, and how that whole family reacts to the knotted, disintegrating relationship of the parents.” She felt that Diane Keaton had redeemed herself for her weak performance in Reds, and Albert Finney, playing her tormented husband, was her match—they gave “the kind of performances that in the theater become legendary.” Pauline’s advocacy did not help Shoot the Moon, which grossed only a little more than $7 million on a budget of $12 million.

  As the year went on, she also admired Jean-Jacques Beineix’s French thriller Diva, thinking the director someone “who understands the pleasures to be had from a picture that doesn’t take itself very seriously.” And she was delighted by Steven Spielberg’s captivating fantasy E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, which she described as “a dream of a movie—a bliss-out.” She was encouraged to see Spielberg applying his prodigious imagination to a touching, human story; to her, it made up for the mechanical excesses of Raiders of the Lost Ark: “He’s like a boy soprano lilting with joy all through E.T., and we’re borne along by his voice.”

  It was reassuring when she celebrated the return to form of Robert Altman with Come Back to the Five & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. She was fond of telling people that she couldn’t quite account for Altman’s talent—that when he was on his game, he was remarkable, but when he was off it, one would never guess that he had any talent at all. Come Back to the Five & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean began life as a play by Ed Graczyk, which Altman directed on Broadway in early 1982. It got downbeat reviews and ran for only fifty-two performances. Graczyk had written the kind of well-made play that had become a staple of Broadway in the ’40s and ’50s—the kind in which the characters’ self-delusions and hypocrisies are systematically revealed—the sort of thing that seemed antithetical to Altman’s intuitive style. It concerned the reunion of a James Dean fan club on the twentieth anniversary of the star’s death, and Pauline thought that in its “fake-poetic, fake magical way, it reeks of the worst of William Inge, of Tennessee Williams misunderstood.” After its failure onstage Altman had filmed it for under $1 million with most of the same cast. Cher, Sandy Dennis, Karen Black, and Kathy Bates all reprised their roles, and Pauline thought that what the director had gotten out of them was remarkable: