by Brian Kellow
The strategic voting of the NYFCC had long been a challenge. Choices that received a handful of votes in the first ballot could wind up being triumphant in the third and fourth ballots because, as the field of possible winners narrowed and shifted, critics were often more concerned with blocking their least favorite choices than with backing their number-one preferences. It was a frustrating process, and one person who most objected to it was Georgia Brown, a critic at The Village Voice, Andrew Sarris having decamped for The New York Observer. Brown found Driving Miss Daisy’s view of black servitude offensively regressive and sentimental. And when she saw its star Jessica Tandy building a groundswell of support, with none at all going to her costar, Morgan Freeman, she got angry. Her anger intensified as she saw her own favorite, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, losing ground in the balloting process.
Brown’s article on the NYFCC process, “Bite the Ballot,” published in the Voice in early 1989, featured a single illustration: a publicity photo of Pauline. After outlining her frustrations with the voting process, she shifted blame in Pauline’s direction for the move against Do the Right Thing. “Does Kael orchestrate campaigns inside the film societies?” Brown asked. “She may. Last year while being inducted into the NYFCC, the then chairman warned that I might receive some ‘lobbying’ phone calls before the December voting.” That was the most cogent piece of evidence Brown could summon against Pauline, and in her rambling, unfocused article, she strongly suggested that Pauline was guilty of (a) organizing her acolytes in a voting bloc—a point she might have been able to prove had she done her homework—and (b) out-and-out racism because she didn’t back Do the Right Thing—an argument that wasn’t really argued at all. Brown’s article received more attention than it merited and proved to be more damaging than it had any right to be, serving as a sad reminder that the idea and intent behind a movie had become more significant than the results onscreen.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Pauline’s physical condition worsened at a faster rate than she and her doctors had anticipated. Although it was not yet preventing her from keeping up her regular reviewing duties, the task of writing was becoming more and more arduous; she found that the words didn’t pour out of her at the rate they once had. There was no ignoring the fact that the Parkinson’s was affecting her memory; she would start to call a longtime friend or acquaintance, but the name wouldn’t surface. She had always had an excellent memory—for details, for facts, for entire scenes and stretches of dialogue in movies that she hadn’t seen for decades—and more and more she would have to rely on the fact-checkers at The New Yorker to back her up on certain details in a movie review. (Fortunately, it was part of the checkers’ job to go to the movies and take notes, a policy that had been instituted years earlier as a method of dealing with Penelope Gilliatt’s lapses.)
One night in 1990 Pauline sat through a screening of Penny Marshall’s Awakenings, based on Oliver Sacks’s book about treating comatose patients with the drug L-dopa. While it was difficult for her to watch the film, given her struggles to become accustomed to life with Parkinson’s, still, she didn’t go soft on the movie, which she considered a betrayal of the most compelling aspects of its source.
To make matters worse, she was saddened by most of the movies that were being released. She was not taken in by Michael Moore’s Roger & Me, a documentary about the economic devastation in the wake of the closing of eleven General Motors plants in Flint, Michigan. Audiences responded enthusiastically to Moore’s muckraking spirit and were eager to hail him as a new truth-teller and counterculture hero, but Pauline found the film shockingly mean-spirited; she hated the way Moore scored cheap laughs off the poor people of Flint who were simply trying to get by any way they could. “The picture is like the work of a slick ad exec,” she wrote. “It does something that is humanly very offensive: Roger & Me uses its leftism as a superior attitude.”
There were, unfortunately, signs of her fatigue showing up on the pages of The New Yorker. She liked Stephen Frears’s The Grifters, based on Jim Thompson’s book about a trio of con artists, but she wasn’t quite able to convey the movie’s pulse and originality in her review. She also liked Martin Scorsese’s latest, Goodfellas, and while she thought the film missed greatness because Scorsese and his scriptwriter, Nicholas Pileggi (who adapted his own book), hadn’t shaped the material, she acknowledged that “the moviemaking has such bravura that you respond as if you were at a live performance.”
She took aim at one of the year’s biggest, Dances with Wolves, the drama about a Civil War soldier who befriends the Sioux and eventually becomes a tribal member. “There’s nothing affected about Costner’s acting or directing,” she wrote. “You hear his laid-back, surfer accent; you see his deliberate goofy faints and falls, and all the close-ups of his handsomeness. This epic was made by a bland megalomaniac. (The Indians should have named him Plays with Camera.) You look at that untroubled face and know he can make everything lightweight.”
In December she made the very last of her lost-cause pitches, this time for Karel Reisz’s Everybody Wins, with Debra Winger as a flaked-out hooker involved in a mystery in a small New England town. The movie was sneaked into release early in 1990 and bombed, but now, nearly a year later, Pauline exhorted her readers to catch it on VHS. She had a touching observation about the fate of Everybody Wins that indicated the depths of her discouragement: “For a brief period in the late sixties and early seventies, moviegoers seemed willing to be guided through a movie by their intuition and imagination; if this slyly funny picture about the spread of corruption had been released then, it might have been considered a minor classic.”
It was that period that she hoped, against all evidence to the contrary, might somehow be resuscitated in some form or another. But what had happened to the movies went far beyond the blockbuster mentality and the studio’s obsession with repeated formulas and marketing strategies. The past decade had seen a steady erosion of the pride of place in the culture that movies had once held. A great deal of that development was a function of the video revolution: The ideas of movies as an event, an actual performance unfolding before you, was no longer relevant; now films could be experienced over several nights at home, robbing them of the impact they once had on audiences. In New York the booming video industry had proved to be the death knell of the great abundance of revival theaters. Critics, as a result, were fated to become less and less important. It was a good time for Pauline to stop regular reviewing.
One evening that January she had shown up at the Broadway Screening Room to see Paul Mazursky’s new comedy, Scenes from a Mall, costarring Woody Allen and Bette Midler. One of the few people in attendance was Owen Gleiberman, who got into a conversation with her about Jonathan Demme’s latest, Silence of the Lambs. Pauline hadn’t liked it at all—she felt Demme was selling out by making a highly commercial story in which he wasn’t particularly interested and that didn’t play to any of his strengths as a director. She seemed to sense that Silence of the Lambs was going to be a big hit for him, which it was—it would even earn him the Academy Award for Best Director. “The movies are so shitty now,” she sighed to Gleiberman.
The lights went down, and Scenes from a Mall began. It was abysmal—a shocking comedown from a director she had always believed in, a director who had continued to deepen his craft and vision over more than twenty years.
She was seventy-one, and she was tired and in failing health—and the movies weren’t worth the time and effort anymore. She notified The New Yorker of her decision: Her review of the Steve Martin comedy L.A. Story, in the magazine’s February 11, 1991, issue, would be her last. A reviewing career that had begun at the magazine with Bonnie and Clyde would end with L.A. Story.
By March the news of her retirement had been made public. It received major coverage in many leading newspapers and magazines, where it was viewed as the end of a spectacular era. “For a brief, golden time in the ’70s . . . it must have seemed as if the movies the
mselves had caught up with her vision of what they ought to be: subversive and supple, erotic and multilayered and alive,” wrote David Ansen in Newsweek. “But the passionate cinematic ‘energy’ she sought became increasingly supplanted by a crass, bludgeoning energy that was like a cruel parody of the kinds of movies she fought for. Kael may have changed the face of criticism, but she’s always been playing a bigger, more impossible game—to change the movies themselves, and us with them.” “At worst, she wasn’t far from a film-world version of Walter Winchell, conducting vendettas and boosting intimates,” wrote Tom Carson in L.A. Weekly. “These habits are unseemly; they detract from Kael’s greatness. They don’t change the fact that greatness is the right word.” Pauline herself put a much lighter spin on it, telling the press that she would still write occasionally for The New Yorker. As far as giving up regular reviewing was concerned, she insisted that no should be sorry on her behalf—after all, now she wouldn’t ever have to sit through another Oliver Stone movie.
In fact, she had occupied the spotlight for so long, in a more vital and ongoing way than any other movie critic ever had, that stepping out of it was not easy. On May 2, 1991, she was awarded the Mel Novikoff Award at the San Francisco Film Society, for a body of work that “enhanced and expanded the filmgoing public’s knowledge and appreciation of world cinema.” (She wasn’t feeling well enough to fly to California, and her friend Michael Sragow accepted on her behalf.) Journalists still telephoned her for quotes, young filmmakers still showed up on her doorstep in Great Barrington seeking her advice, film companies still inundated her with video copies of their latest releases. She continued to keep up with everything, weighing in with her younger critic friends about new movies, still trying to have an influence on what was being written about them—and in many cases, succeeding.
In the fall of 1991 Movie Love, a collection of her last three years of New Yorker reviews, was brought out by Dutton. The Los Angeles Times Book Review said that it provided “welcome reading at a time when film criticism seems to have been reduced to ‘a 10!’ and ‘Two Thumbs up.’ ” A few months after the book’s release, her hometown honored her by proclaiming a Pauline Kael Day during Petaluma History Week. By now Petaluma had become a gentrified community with more than a little of Ye Olde Country Village atmosphere—far too precious for Pauline’s taste. She again offered the genuine excuse of ill health and declined to show up to celebrate her honor.
Life for the Paulettes had become quite different, in many cases, now that Pauline was in retirement. For one thing, they lacked the advantage of attending screenings with her and going out afterward to a restaurant to talk over the movie they had just seen, sparking thoughts and ideas in many directions. For another, the world at large didn’t seem as welcoming to them without Pauline as their mentor. People who had branded them—unfairly, in some cases—as imitators now felt the freedom to dismiss them. Without her, there seemed to be much less point in being a Paulette. A number of them felt betrayed when they failed to become the powerful force that she had once been.
At The New Yorker, meanwhile, Terrence Rafferty had been moved into the first-ranking film critic’s position. Initially, Pauline had supported him, but she grew to believe that his approach was too dry and that he wasn’t focusing on the right movies or responding to them in the proper way. To back up Rafferty, Robert Gottlieb hired Pauline’s friend Michael Sragow. She was delighted that James Wolcott had landed a staff position at the award-winning Texas Monthly—one of the smartest magazines around. She prodded Polly Frost in the direction of movie criticism, and Frost eventually began reviewing for Harper’s Bazaar and Elle. Pauline regularly read Steve Vineberg’s work for The Threepenny Review, and encouraged his work as a stage director. She came to see a production of John Guare’s Marco Polo Sings a Solo that Vineberg staged, and urged him to move to New York to try his work as a director full-time; she was baffled when he told her that he loved his job at the College of the Holy Cross and wanted to keep it. The passing of time had done nothing to diminish her disdain for academic life.
There remained a serious degree of competition among the Paulettes, one that heated up if it was felt that she was favoring one—as when she recommended David Edelstein over the others for a series of positions. (She began telling friends that she thought Edelstein should succeed Terrence Rafferty at The New Yorker.) Often, there were extreme tensions in the Great Barrington house if a group of Paulettes had been invited for a weekend; the sense of competitiveness over who was closest to Pauline was almost palpable. One person who remained wary of many of the rowdier and more outspoken Paulettes was Gina, who regarded some of them as users and manipulators, and was skeptical about her mother’s intense engagement with them.
Many of the Paulettes were hesitant about introducing their wives and girlfriends to their mentor. When James Wolcott became seriously involved with the talented writer and editor Laura Jacobs, who eventually became his wife, he told her that he wasn’t going to introduce her to Pauline because Pauline wouldn’t like her. Besides Polly Frost, however, she was fond of Stephanie Zacharek, another critic for The Boston Phoenix, who eventually married the film critic and essayist Charles Taylor, whose career Pauline had followed with interest for some time. Zacharek had idolized Pauline when she was growing up, and the day that Taylor took her to meet Pauline in Great Barrington, Zacharek was extremely nervous. She was an attractive redhead, and Pauline put her at ease immediately by opening the door and saying, “Oh—you have Annette O’Toole’s hair!”
Oddly enough, she had rather kind feelings toward Molly Haskell, who was married to her chief agitator, Andrew Sarris. Pauline was quick to point out that she thought Sarris had a lively intelligence, and that she had refrained from commenting on his work after “Circles and Squares”—the so-called feud between them was mostly maintained by Sarris over the years. “Pauline felt that Molly, once she married Sarris, really hampered herself,” observed Wolcott, “because there was no way that she was not going to bow to his greater authority. She felt that Molly never became the critic she might have been, because she took up so many of Andy’s tastes and sensibilities. Even when she differed, she had to explain why she differed.”
Similarly, Pauline often regretted that the wives of important artists took such a backseat to their husbands. When she had dinner with Satyajit Ray, a director whose work she had admired for decades, she found his wife, Bijoya, to be extremely bright and poised. But she noticed that when Ray began to speak, Bijoya became silently adoring. At one point in their conversation, Pauline mildly challenged one of Ray’s opinions about a movie. The director froze, and his wife gave Pauline a look to indicate that she had deeply offended the great man.
Her younger friends admired her for hanging on to her democratic spirit; spending time with Pauline was a teaching experience that went beyond the bounds of talking about writing. Charles Taylor remembered, “I once said, in a fit of frustration, ‘Stupid people drive me crazy.’ And she said, ‘You know, some people just aren’t bright. They can’t help that.’” Another time, Polly Frost was with Pauline at a party where one of the other guests was complaining about her recent experience on jury duty. “These people were all housewives, and what do they know?” she snapped. Pauline turned to her and said, “And what did your mother do?”
In late 1994, with several of Pauline’s earlier volumes having gone out of print, Dutton published For Keeps, a huge compendium of her reviews, spanning her entire career. By February 1995 it appeared in the number-six position on The Village Voice Literary Supplement’s list of hardcover bestsellers. (By January 1996, it had sold more than 18,000 copies in hardcover—an excellent run.) Pauline had gone carefully through all of her published reviews and essays, in conjunction with Billy Abrahams, and carefully excerpted the pieces of writing she considered her best. (Perhaps because she had battle fatigue, she omitted several of her more controversial reviews, including the ones of The Children’s Hour, The Sergeant, Rich and Famou
s, and Shoah.) In her author’s note she discussed the pleasures of a lifetime of reviewing films. “I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs,” she wrote. “I think I have.” Many friends and colleagues continued to prod her to do a memoir, however, including Peggy Brooks, who spent a weekend with Pauline and Charles Simmons in Great Barrington in September of 1994. “I kept bringing up the idea of her work on an autobiography,” Brooks wrote to Abrahams. “She was resistant at first, but it seemed both to Charles and me, that towards the end, she was starting to think about it seriously. I know it’s difficult for her physically to write now, but her head is in such sharp shape, I think she could do a fascinating book, different from any other of hers.” The memoir never came to pass.
One of her greatest pleasures continued to be her grandson. Will, now ten, was an energetic, quixotic boy who didn’t seem particularly interested in either his studies or athletics—several friends observed that he seemed to live almost in a world of his own. His interests were few but intense. He loved action figures and action movies—Bruce Lee was a favorite. He was fascinated by space—any television documentary on black holes was certain to capture his attention—and he loved his enormous collection of big, unbreakable Carnegie animals. Pauline indulged him in all of these, never attempting to steer him toward a more “serious” path. She thought that children should be left alone, allowed to find their own way, and she happily joined him in watching Bruce Lee movies. She seemed intent on giving her seal of approval to Will’s uncomplicated pursuit of pop culture in the same sense that she had once tried to tell her readers that there was no need to feel guilty about enjoying kitsch and trash.