by Brian Kellow
Probably everyone will agree that the subject of a movie should not place it beyond criticism.... I ask the forbearance of readers for a dissenting view of a film that is widely regarded as a masterpiece. I found Shoah logy and exhausting right from the start, and when it had been going on for an hour or longer, I was squirming restlessly, my attention slackening.
She followed this equivocal opening with an objection to Lanzmann’s interviewing techniques: “We watch him putting pressure on people—pouncing on a detail here or there—and we register the silences, the hesitancies, the breakdowns . . . sitting in a theatre seat for a film as full of dead spaces as this one seems to me a form of self-punishment.” She went on to compare Shoah unfavorably with the level of moral complexity presented in The Sorrow and the Pity, with “so many widely differing instances of collaboration and resistance, and such a steady accumulation of perspectives.” In Shoah Lanzmann seemed to be stacking the deck to show an entire world of blind cruelty, and as a result, she felt there was no way into the movie. It wasn’t quite so much what the film was saying as its way of saying it that disturbed her. “It’s not just the exact procedures used in the extermination process that Lanzmann is hunting down,” she wrote. “He’s after the Gentiles’ attitudes toward the process. Shoah presents a world in which a Gentile rarely shows any human feeling toward a Jew. The Polish peasants who saw Jewish children being thrown into vans by their feet don’t seem to have been upset, or even touched.” She believed that Lanzmann’s principal motive in making the film “appears to be to show you that the Gentiles will do it to the Jews again if they get a chance.” It was a tough and provocative line of thinking, but toward the end of her review, she nearly tumbled off the path of her argument when she said, “The film is diffuse, but Lanzmann is blunt-minded: he’s out to indict the callous. If you were to set him loose, he could probably find anti-Semitism anywhere.” It was a stunning lapse of judgment, considering that Lanzmann was looking for anti-Semitism in the most obvious of places—the death camps. While Pauline’s intellectual honesty was admirable, it was difficult to shake off the feeling that her thinking was influenced by other factors, of which she was only partly conscious.
Lillian Ross recalled,
The Shoah reaction was especially peculiar. I went with Shawn to the two screenings of the documentary, and we agreed with most critics that it was a significant contribution to the record of the horrific Nazi period in history. The documentary was not being offered for judgment of its cinematic technical virtues. Shawn tried to clarify its role, in talking to Pauline Kael about it. With his inimitable patience, he always tried earnestly to reason with anyone clinging stubbornly to unreasonable prejudice or purposes. It might be that Kael’s megalomaniacal possession of anything called film led to her resentment of the director Claude Lanzmann as an interloper in her territory, and therefore she insisted that Shoah had to be reviewed only as a movie. It might be that Kael’s own Jewish heritage accounted for her need to harbor complicated and perverse ways of demonstrating that she was free of the painful abhorrence of the holocaust felt by other people. I don’t know. Shawn ran her ‘review’ as she insisted.
Shawn’s fears about Pauline’s response to the movie proved justified: Her comments proved antagonistic to the Jewish community, in New York and elsewhere. There was an immediate outcry from the respected critic Alfred Kazin, from The New Republic’s Leon Wieseltier, and from her by now regular adversary, The Village Voice, represented this time by J. Hoberman. Wieseltier went so far as to suggest that she didn’t see Shoah’s worth because the movie refrained from depicting the violence to which she was obviously addicted; he said she might have liked it better if it had been directed by Brian De Palma.
One of the most incensed readers was Dan Talbot, who wrote a long letter of protest to Pauline, and copied Shawn on it:
I’m upset about how unmoved you represent yourself in the face of such emotionally disturbing testimony in the movie.... I simply cannot understand how you were unable to respond in some way and even fail to write about survivor Simon Srebnik’s visit, for the first time in over thirty years, to Chelmno, where 400,000 Jews were murdered. His account of what happened at Chelmno in the 1940’s is surely one of the most moving episodes ever put on film. This scene occurs at the beginning of the film. Minutes later, Mordechai Pod-chelebink, the second survivor of Chelmno . . . recounts in very poetic Yiddish how he placed his wife and children in the grave at Chelmno and then asked to be killed. The Germans kept him alive; they said he was strong enough to work. He is crying as he tells this tragic epic. How is it possible not to respond deeply—Jew or Gentile—to all this?
. . . Did you learn something? Did you know before seeing the film that children under four rode the death trains free of charge while those under ten went half-fare? And that these trains were booked by German travel agents? And paid for by the proceeds of confiscated Jewish property? That the Jewish workers in the gas chambers were not allowed to use the words “corpse” or “dead bodies” but instead “puppets” and “rags”? Can you imagine a great fiction writer improving upon all this? Don’t you at least think that Lanzmann’s selection of material out of 350 hours of footage he shot is done with the mind and heart of a great artisan, if not an artist?
He closed his lengthy letter with a telling observation: “You’re often on target but some forces outside of film criticism prevented you from experiencing this work in a whole way.”
Shawn called Talbot and confided that, although he had never censored one of the magazine’s critics, he had seriously considered not running the review. Pauline did not respond to Talbot’s letter, and they did not speak for an entire year.
A number of Pauline’s other friends parted company with her in their views on Shoah. Owen Gleiberman—then a young critic at The Boston Phoenix, and one who liked the film very much—thought that her review was one of her greatest efforts, and that it actually showed deep respect for the profundity of the Holocaust. David Edelstein had also admired Shoah, and couldn’t help wondering if part of her resistance to the film had to do with her deep-rooted suspicion of any religious group. “She had so little use for doctrine, or for Torah scholarship, or any of that crap,” said Edelstein. “She was as dismissive of it as anyone I’ve ever known. Uncomprehending. But I do believe that she couldn’t have written what she wrote if she didn’t on some level believe in an oversoul, some sort of interconnectedness that I think the great artists tap into and that she tapped into when she wrote about their work. I am sure she would snort like crazy if she heard me talk about it in those terms. I believe that she was an extremely spiritual person without being in any way, shape, or form a believer. I’ve met many skeptics, and in some ways they’re extremely obnoxious in their bottom-line dismissal of the idea of transcendence. They are so wedded to this idea that any discussion of the spirit is a delusion, that they can’t even give themselves to great art in a way that Pauline would recognize. Pauline could be transported—she could go to another place without identifying it as religious.”
On the subject of Shoah, Pauline herself remained unrepentant. Nine years after her review appeared, she told The New Yorker’s Hal Espen that “a Holocaust movie should not be sacrosanct simply because of the subject. I think most of the reviewers were willing to call the director of Shoah a great filmmaker because he’d taken on a great subject. They used to treat Stanley Kramer as a great filmmaker, too, especially when he made the nuclear-disaster movie On the Beach.” Perhaps she tired of the way her thoughts on Shoah shadowed her, though: Nearly a decade later, when For Keeps, a compendium of her selected criticism, was published, the review was not included.
As the time came to vote on the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, Pauline lined up behind Prizzi’s Honor for Best Picture, and pushed for Jack Nicholson to win Best Actor and John Huston Best Director for Prizzi, and Jessica Lange (Sweet Dreams) and Coral Browne (Dreamchild) for Best Actress. That year her tastes prevailed, for t
he most part: Prizzi’s Honor did win prizes for Best Picture and for Nicholson, John Huston, and Angelica Huston, while Norma Aleandros took Best Actress for The Official Story. Woody Allen took the Screenplay prize for The Purple Rose of Cairo. Pauline was disappointed only in the Best Documentary prize, which went to Shoah.
The first half of 1986 continued to bring few films that fully engaged Pauline. She was quite taken with Paul Mazursky’s Down and Out in Beverly Hills, a reworking of Jean Renoir’s classic comedy Boudu Saved from Drowning, and she thought the movie’s view of the new money of Beverly Hills was wonderfully soft-edged and beautifully realized—the kind of generous-spirited social satire she always loved. For some years she had been an unabashed fan of Bette Midler, but she also perceived that hers was the kind of outsized talent that was going to have difficulty finding the right movie roles. In Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Pauline thought that Midler had “never before been this seductive on the screen. This is only the fourth picture she has starred in, and you see a softer, less funky Midler; she’s playing the role of a bored, dissatisfied housewife who has something extra—a warped charm rather like that of Teri Garr, but riper, juicier.” She found Geraldine Page giving one of the year’s most acclaimed performances in The Trip to Bountiful, nearly as actressy as she had back in 1961 in the screen version of Summer and Smoke. And she resisted joining in the chorus of praise hurled at Woody Allen’s new picture, Hannah and Her Sisters, about the romantic entanglements of three New York women. Pauline’s notes are especially revealing here: “Allen’s idea of movie acting is the reading of lines,” she scribbled to herself. “It doesn’t just repeat his work, it repeats itself.” In her printed review she wrote, “The movie is a little stale, and it suggests the perils of inbreeding. It might be time for Woody Allen to make a film with a whole new set of friends, or, at least, to take a long break from his sentimentalization of New York City.” Pauline often told friends that she wanted to carry a Harpo Marx seltzer bottle around with her and use it to squirt certain characters on the screen who irritated her. Writer Allen Barra remembered that she considered Sam Waterston as the smug architect in Hannah and Her Sisters a good candidate for squirting. “I don’t want to hurt him,” she said. “I just want to squirt him.”
Early 1986 was a frantic period: Pauline spent whatever little time was left between New Yorker deadlines promoting her latest collection of reviews, State of the Art, published by Dutton, where Billy Abrahams had moved and where she had followed him. In the introduction she cued readers to her thoughts on the changes in the movie industry during the 1980s, which she chose to signify by departing from her usual sexually tinged book title. (The original choice had been Spitting Images.) “It seemed time for a change; this has not been a period for anything like Grand Passions. I hope that State of the Art will sound ominous and sweeping and just slightly clinical.” While promoting the book, she told interviewers that although she admired the technological advances in cinematography and sound, she was constantly disappointed that the movies had lost the riskiness they’d developed in the previous decade—now they were simply too square for her. Ultimately, State of the Art didn’t sell nearly as well as many of her previous books had done: The net sales of the clothbound and paperback versions combined added up to 14,944.
For much of the 1980s Pauline had suffered from fairly steady bouts of heart trouble—the lining of her heart was perilously thin, and she had attacks of angina. She tried not to yield to it and to continue with her punishing schedule, but she did suffer a couple of collapses in screening rooms, and she carried nitroglycerine pills in her purse. Trent Duffy, who had worked as a production editor and indexer on several of her books, remembered the subject coming up while she was doing the promotional tour for State of the Art. Duffy was escorting her from one Fifth Avenue bookstore to another. It was a bitterly cold December, and Pauline insisted on taking a taxi everywhere. Duffy was surprised, since they were going only from Fifty-seventh Street to Fifty-third Street, but Pauline, who was holding a scarf over her face, told him that her doctor had asked her not to spend any time in the cold when the temperature was below thirty degrees. “This bum ticker of mine,” she muttered.
In the winter of 1986 Pauline was delighted to celebrate the release of Stephen Frears’s My Beautiful Launderette. With the major studios steadily turning out such dross, it was small, independent pictures such as My Beautiful Launderette, made for less than $1 million, that were drawing an enthusiastic audience—the viewers who used to be defined as the “art house” crowd. Pauline loved this spiky love story set in punk-infested South London, about two young men, Omar and Johnny (Gordon Warnecke and Daniel Day-Lewis), who inject some life into their seedy neighborhood by opening a spiffed-up, trendy laundromat. Pauline wrote, “Frears is responsive to grubby desperation and to the uncouthness and energy in English life—he’s responsive to what went into the punk-music scene and to what goes into teen-age gang life.” She found that “Frears’s editing rhythms that seem so right are actually very odd. My Beautiful Launderette doesn’t feel like any other movie; it’s almost as if he’s cutting to the rhythm of Pakistani-accented English—to what you can hear even in the quirky lilt of the title.” She loved Day-Lewis’s performance as the constantly daring Johnny, and she loved the movie’s light, unself-conscious portrayal of two men in love: “This Johnny wants to make something of himself, and he’ll go through more than his share of humiliation to do it,” she wrote. “He also enjoys wooing the cuddly Omar. He can’t resist touching Omar with his tongue when they’re out on the street, right in front of the launderette, with white-racist rowdies all around them. He can’t resist being frisky, because it’s dangerous, and that makes it more erotic.”
The fact that My Beautiful Launderette and other “small pictures” (such as James Ivory’s A Room with a View) were able to break through and find their audience was heartening to Pauline. The fates of most films now seemed pegged solely on the question of how big a noise could be made about them. This and this alone was seen by the industry—and by a growing part of the audience—as the sole measure of their worth. The strong, cautionary words, the advocacy for smart, risky, creative filmmaking that Pauline had poured forth in her column for years may have been more important than ever, but they seemed increasingly futile. The movie executives who had once read her with great fascination, even when she destroyed their films, now were far less interested in what she had to say. The marketing lords had figured out a way to make certain films—many films—critic-proof. Don Simpson’s power had reached its apex, while Pauline’s was on the decline.
All of this was very much on her mind when she reviewed Top Gun, a Tom Cruise action picture about fighter pilots that became one of the top box-office hits of the summer of 1986. It was produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, and Pauline wrote, “Selling is what they think moviemaking is about. The result is a new ‘art’ form: the self-referential commercial. Top Gun is a recruiting poster that isn’t concerned with recruiting but with being a poster.”
Still, she advocated steadfastly for the few signs of life she saw on the movie scene. One came with David Lynch’s latest, Blue Velvet. The film belonged to a rather overworked genre: the study of a small town whose calm exterior masks sexual perversities and violent tensions. But this was nothing for the mainstream bestseller mentality, such as Kings Row or Peyton Place: In exploring the unexpected horrors that lurk in the little town of Lumberton, Blue Velvet took many audience members to a place they weren’t entirely sure they wanted to be. As the odd, clean-cut, yet slightly bent Jeffrey, whose coming of age is the final destination point of the bizarre plot, Kyle MacLach-lan gave what Pauline termed “a phenomenal performance.” The film, she thought, was “the work of a genius naïf. If you feel that there’s very little art between you and the filmmaker’s psyche, it may be because there’s less than the usual amount of inhibition. Lynch doesn’t censor his sexual fantasies, and the film’s hypercharged erotic atmosph
ere makes it something of a trance-out, but his humor keeps breaking through, too.”
She also loved the spirit of twenty-nine-year-old Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It, which was shot in black and white in twelve days for around $175,000 and grossed more than $7 million—around the same amount as the studio-backed Blue Velvet. Pauline thought Lee had the rarest gift of all—“what for want of a better term is called ‘a film sense.’ It’s an instinct for how to make a movie move—for how much motion there should be in a shot, for how fast to cut the shots, for how to make them flow into each other rhythmically.” And she was delighted by Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild, largely because Demme possessed “a true gift for informality . . . I can’t think of any other director who is so instinctively and democratically interested in everybody he shows you. Each time a new face appears, it’s looked at with such absorption and delight that you almost think the movie will flit off and tell this person’s story.”
At the 1986 New York Film Critics Circle Awards, she supported Blue Velvet, although she would have been happy to see Something Wild win. Unfortunately, she was thwarted across the board: Hannah and Her Sisters swept the prizes, winning Best Picture, Best Director for Woody Allen, and Best Supporting Actress for Dianne Wiest. The NYFCC, however, ignored the film that won that year’s Academy Award for Best Picture, Oliver Stone’s Platoon. Pauline spent the first paragraph of her review laying out Stone’s (to her) suspect background: Yale dropout, failed, nomadic writer, decorated soldier in Vietnam, postwar druggie, then NYU film student under Martin Scorsese. “We can surmise,” Pauline wrote (perhaps somewhat unfairly), “that Stone became a grunt in Vietnam to ‘become a man’ and to become a writer. As Platoon, a coming-of-age film, demonstrates, he went through his rite of passage, but, as Platoon also demonstrates, he became a very bad writer—a hype artist.” She recognized that Stone was trying to show the madness brought on by Vietnam in a more visceral way than it had ever been shown before, but, despite such touches as the use of her old sparring partner Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings as counterpoint for the bloody battle scenes, Platoon lacked the poetry, however misshapen, of The Deer Hunter. “The results are overwrought,” Pauline wrote, “with too much filtered light, too much poetic license, and too damn much romanticized insanity.”