Pauline Kael

by Brian Kellow

  If the roles made better sense, the actresses might not be able to plunge so far down into themselves or pull up so much emotion. It’s because this glib, religioso play is so derivative that the actors have found so much depth in it. When actors peel away layers of inhibition, they feel they’re uncovering “truth” and it’s traditional for directors and acting teachers to call it that. But this truth may be derived from their stored-up pop mythology—atrocity stories from sources as diverse as comic books, TV, and Joan Didion, and tales of sacrificial heroes and heroines that go back beyond the birth of movies to the first storytellers. “Truthful” acting may be affecting to us because it represents the sum total of everything the actors have been affected by.

  Pauline found the movie “a genuine oddity—like Night of the Iguana performed by a company of seraphim.” But Altman’s old magic relit the screen, and Pauline’s joy in welcoming him back was almost palpable:

  Altman keeps looking at the world, and it’s never the same; what we’re responding to is his consciousness at work (and play). The sunlight coming through the shop’s glass front and the dusty pastel colors are part of the film’s texture, along with the women’s hair and heads and hands, which are always touching, moving. Present and past interpenetrate, and Altman keeps everything in motion. (The close-ups are pauses, not full stops.) His feeling for the place is almost as tactile as his feeling for the performers. When the characters’ passions well up the camera is right there, recording the changes in their neck muscles, their arms, their cheeks. But it never crowds them.

  One of the fascinating aspects of the careers of so many movie stars is that their peak years are usually over so quickly. What seemed fresh and spontaneous and original about them—the very qualities that made the public take to them in the first place—can seem like mannerisms and limitations. Only a few years earlier, Jane Fonda had seemed primed for a long run as the screen’s premier actress, but after her stiff performances in 9 to 5 and On Golden Pond, it was clear her peak years were finished. Meryl Streep was rapidly rising as the most important actress on the screen, complete with the validation of uniformly excellent reviews and a Time cover story, but Pauline continued to resist her charms. Streep’s much-celebrated technique was just that to Pauline—lacking the warm glow of a genuine personality behind it. In Still of the Night, Streep’s 1982 psychological thriller, Pauline thought the actress didn’t “resemble a living person; her face is gaunt, her skin has become alabaster. She seems to have chosen to do a Meryl Streep parody; she’s like some creature from the moon trying to be a movie star.”

  Streep’s big film of the year, and the one that would win her her second Academy Award, was Sophie’s Choice, based on William Styron’s bestselling novel about a Polish holocaust survivor living with her abusive boyfriend in Brooklyn. The film was, for Pauline, “encrusted with the weighty culture of big themes: evil, tortured souls, guilt.” In her review, she did a masterful job at identifying again what troubled her most about the actress:

  Streep is very beautiful at times, and she does amusing, nervous bits of business, like fidgeting with a furry boa—her fingers twiddling with our heartstrings. She has, as usual, put thought and effort into her work. But something about her puzzles me: after I’ve seen her in a movie, I can’t visualize her from the neck down. Is it possible that as an actress she makes herself into a blank and then focuses all her attention on only one thing—the toss of her head, for example, in Manhattan, her accent here? Maybe, by bringing an unwarranted intensity to one facet of a performance, she in effect decorporealizes herself. This could explain why her movie heroines don’t seem to be full characters, and why there are no incidental joys to be had from watching her. It could be that in her zeal to be an honest actress she allows nothing to escape her conception of a performance. Instead of trying to achieve freedom in front of the camera, she’s predetermining what it records.

  Years later, in an interview, Streep admitted that Pauline’s review of Sophie’s Choice affected her deeply. “I’m incapable of not thinking about what Pauline wrote, and you know what I think?” the actress said. “That Pauline was a poor Jewish girl who was at Berkeley with all these rich Pasadena WASPs with long blond hair, and the heartlessness of them got her.” Certainly many of the actresses Pauline admired most onscreen were Jewish—from Sylvia Sidney and Paulette Goddard to Barbra Streisand, Goldie Hawn, and Debra Winger. But Streep’s theory ignores the fact that Pauline was overwhelmed by many beautiful blond women on the screen—from Catherine Deneuve to Michelle Pfeiffer.

  Pauline was also baffled by the latest appearance of Robert De Niro, one of the screen actors in whom she had placed the most hope. De Niro was reunited with Martin Scorsese for The King of Comedy, in which the actor played a sociopath named Rupert Pupkin, who wants nothing more than to become a star TV comic. He obsessively worships Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis), star of a Johnny Carson–style late-night program, and when he has exhausted every possible attempt to get Langford to pay attention to him, Rupert kidnaps the star, telling the police he will release him only in exchange for a ten-minute spot on the show.

  The King of Comedy turned out to be far more prescient about the future of television than Network ever dreamed of being: Rupert does indeed make a hit with the audience, gets a big book deal, and lands on the cover of several national magazines after serving only a light sentence. At the end of the film, Jerry Langford walks past a store window and sees Rupert on TV. The movie presaged Morton Downey, Jr., and Monica Lewinsky—figures who took the low road as a way of spinning celebrity.

  But Pauline dismissed The King of Comedy as “quiet and empty,” and she thought that Scorsese “designs his own form of alienation in this movie—it seems to teeter between jokiness and hate.” Most surprising was her view of De Niro, whom she felt gave a hollow, chilly performance as Pupkin, never endowing him the sort of humanity that might trigger a strong emotional response in the audience. What De Niro achieved in The King of Comedy, she believed, was close to what he had done in Raging Bull. It was “anti-acting”:

  Performers such as John Barrymore and Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier have delighted in putting on beards and false noses, yet, no matter how heavy the disguise, they didn’t disappear; they still had spirit, and we could feel the pleasure that they took in playing foul, crookback monsters and misers—drawing us inside and revealing the terrors of the misshapen, the deluded. A great actor merges his soul with that of his characters—or, at least, gives us the illusion that he does. De Niro in disguise denies his characters a soul. It’s not merely that he hollows himself out and becomes Jake La Motta, or Des the priest in True Confessions, or Rupert Pupkin—he makes them hollow, too, and merges with the character’s emptiness.

  Since they met in 1980, Gina’s relationship with Warner Friedman had blossomed, and on March 17, 1982, she gave birth to their son, William James. Like Pauline, Gina had a deep desire to have a child, but she was not entirely certain about marriage. Then, on Will’s first birthday, Friedman and Gina invited a group of friends, including Pauline, over to celebrate at Friedman’s house in Sheffield, Massachusetts. He had secretly called a justice of the peace to show up and marry him and Gina before the gathering, and when he announced his plan, Pauline’s voice emerged loud and clear from the group: “Oh, shit.” She was no less skeptical about marriage than she had ever been—and the thought that Friedman would now have an even greater claim on Gina’s attention was jarring to her.

  Friedman and Pauline often disagreed. She became very angry one evening when he said that all actors were stupid, and on another occasion when, after several drinks, he pronounced, “Movies are not art.” He characterized Pauline’s relationship with Gina as “a distant closeness” and recognized that, as independent as Pauline was, she needed Gina to be close by. Gina, for her part, clearly harbored certain resentments against Pauline. She was angry with herself that she had not rebelled against her mother and insisted on having a proper education—a po
int on which many of Pauline’s friends sympathized with her. Mother and daughter had one important trait in common: they were both self-contained about their emotions, very conscious of not allowing tensions between them to be played out before others. Friedman recalled a time when Gina was hospitalized for some minor surgery. “Pauline sort of showed a little affection,” he recalled, “and Gina was annoyed by it. As close as they seemed, they were not demonstrative.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  For some years Billy Abrahams had been urging Pauline to publish a collection of her capsule reviews, which by now were an institution in The New Yorker’s front-of-book section. She had amassed more than eleven thousand of these pieces, some of them dating back to her days writing program notes for the Berkeley Cinema Guild. Noting the success that Leonard Maltin had had with his own collection of brief reviews, Abrahams urged her to gather her own, and when it became clear that Lays of Ancient Hollywood would not materialize, the project became a priority. Videocassettes of movies were soon to hit the market, and Abrahams knew that if movies on tape led to the anticipated revolution in home viewing, Pauline’s book was likely to be very popular indeed. She chose the title herself—5001 Nights at the Movies. Assembling and editing the collection was a massive task, but when Holt, Rinehart and Winston brought it out in 1982, The Boston Globe’s Mark Sweeney called it “an incomparable dip-in book,” and the Chicago Tribune’s Richard Christiansen dubbed it “a browser’s delight.” It sold very well and eventually had even greater success as a paperback—the only thing that baffled readers was the inclusion of movies such as Car Wash and Straight, Place and Show, with the Ritz Brothers—at the expense of staples such as Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz. Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed that she altered her view of at least one film, Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest. In Kiss Kiss Bang Bang she had called it “one of the most profound emotional experiences in the history of film”; now she still found it great, but qualified her opinion, judging that the slow rhythm might make viewers feel that they were “dying with the priest. The film may raise the question in your mind: Does Bresson know what a pain this young man is?”

  Whatever her feelings about the quality of the films she was reviewing, Pauline’s enthusiasm for writing was undiminished. William Whitworth once observed that of all the staff writers at The New Yorker, no one exhibited the zeal for sitting down to work that she did. By now she was no longer pleased with Daniel Menaker as her direct editor, and requested that he be replaced. William Shawn called Menaker in and said, “I don’t want you to take this personally. You lasted a long time with her. But Miss Kael feels that you may not have the time and attention to give her the sort of editorial help she needs.” Pauline’s idea of the attention she wished for from an editor primarily involved sitting in her office and reading her column aloud to him, with a small electric fan blowing behind her. “Whenever she came across something that she felt didn’t sound like her, she would change it. I had been learning all along from other writers that when you have a genuine voice, you have to listen to it and listen to it carefully. The dark side of that was incredible tedium, after a while. It was more like being a silent witness than it was being an editor. I suppose my impatience showed through.”

  In 1983 Pauline received the Award for Distinguished Journalism from the Newswomen’s Club of New York. She was pleased by the honor, but she had continued to resist any feminist interpretation of her career. She was not comfortable with the increasing labeling of “male” and “female” art and culture and was also ill at ease with the streak of militant anger present in the thinking of so many hard-core feminists. She thought, to paraphrase the writer Suzanne Gordon, that there was a great difference between male objectification and male appreciation, and she did not see that much good could come from the sexes being increasingly isolated from each other.

  In June 1983 she turned sixty-four, and was conscious of a certain physical decline. That summer she suffered a long period of back pain that made it difficult for her to sit in screenings for long periods of time. More worrisome was the frequent tightness in her chest, which struck her when she picked up the mail each day in Great Barrington and began walking back up the hill to her house. She had developed hypertension and tried treating it with the beta blocker Diltiazem, which only made her depressed; her doctors put her on Dyazide, which proved a more effective way of treating her blood pressure. She suffered several more bouts of severe flu, and still had a slight tremor in her hands, which she attributed to the advancing years.

  The summer of 1983 was an unrewarding time to be writing movie criticism. Her review of Flashdance could easily have been interpreted by some Hollywood insiders as an open attack on the man who produced it, Don Simpson—but it is doubtful that Pauline would have liked the film no matter who happened to be at the helm. She trounced it as a “lulling, narcotizing musical; the whole damn thing throbs. It’s a motorized anatomy lesson, designed to turn the kids on and drive older men crazy. It’s soft-core porn with an inspirational message, and it’s maybe the most calculating, platinum-hearted movie I’ve ever seen.” She welcomed Woody Allen back, guardedly, with her review of Zelig, his documentary satire about a chameleon-like personality who inserts himself into the lives of many of the great figures of the century. She felt it was a small success that had been wildly overrated: “The film has a real shine, but it’s like a teeny carnival that you may have missed—it was in the yard behind the Methodist Church last week.”

  That fall, she enjoyed herself tremendously at Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff, based on Tom Wolfe’s book about the marketing of Project Mercury’s groundbreaking team of astronauts. She wrote that the entire film gave off “a pleasurable hum” and that “like Tom Wolfe, Phil Kaufman wants you to find everything he puts in beguilingly wonderful and ironic. That’s the Tom Wolfe tone, and to a surprising degree Kaufman catches it and blends it with his own.” What intrigued her most was the way in which Kaufman, “far more of an anti-establishmentarian than Tom Wolfe,” had taken the book’s “reactionary cornerstone: the notion that a man’s value is determined by his physical courage . . . Yet the film’s comedy scenes are conceived in counterculture terms.”

  Years later, Kaufman still wasn’t certain about Pauline’s term “reactionary cornerstone.” “Someone told me she saw it with a group of her followers,” he said, “and I don’t know if that was a Pauline reaction, purely. The movie was all about the wives and female courage, and all of these things—women holding up. Every scene in the movie was an aspect of the right stuff. It wasn’t all about macho stuff. In fact, a lot of it was downplaying that. Pauline saw a movie once and sometimes she might see it in a mood or with certain people and the mood of the room—and you just have to live with that. I would never think of calling Pauline to try to explain my work to her.”

  She was delighted by Barbra Streisand’s directorial debut with Yentl, released in November. She thought the movie “rhapsodic,” and a welcome musical return to the screen for the star. “Her singing voice takes you farther into the character; the songs express Yentl’s feelings—what she wants to say but has to hold back,” Pauline wrote. “Her singing is more than an interior monologue. When she starts a song, her hushed intensity makes you want to hear her every breath, and there’s high drama in her transitions from verse to chorus.” Pauline had always resented that Streisand had in the past come under fire for her perfectionism, and toward the end of the review, her partisanship came glaring through: “And now that she has made her formal debut as a director, her work explains why she, notoriously, asks so many questions of writers and directors and everyone else—that’s her method of learning. And it also explains why she has sometimes been unhappy with her directors: she really did know better.”

  The year’s most universally acclaimed big studio picture was James L. Brooks’s Terms of Endearment. It had a good premise: the uneasy relationship between an unusual, strong-minded, exceptional-in-some-ways
mother (Shirley MacLaine) and her much less exceptional daughter (Debra Winger), whose life swings out of control when she enters into a bad marriage and later develops terminal cancer. Pauline loathed it, feeling that Brooks had directed “the actors with both eyes on the audience.” Winger confirmed Pauline’s faith in her; she found her performance “incredibly vivid,” but in the end, the film’s manipulative style irritated her: “If Terms had stayed a comedy,” she wrote, “it might have been innocuous, but it had to be ratified by importance, and it uses cancer like a seal of approval. Cancer gives the movie its message: ‘Don’t take people for granted; you never know when you’re going to lose them.’ At the end, the picture says, ‘You can go home now—you’ve laughed, you’ve cried.’ What’s infuriating about it is its calculated humanity.” Terms of Endearment was about as close as the major Hollywood studios seemed to be willing to get to complex, problematic subject matter, and the savvy moviegoer was beginning to perceive the decision-by-committee mentality that had gone into such movies.