25
Dec/19

WHAT SHE SAID: THE ART OF PAULINE KAEL

25
Dec/19
Pauline Kael

The life and career of film critic Pauline Kael is profiled in documentary What She Said

WHAT SHE SAID: THE ART OF PAULINE KAEL (Rob Garver, 2018)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Wednesday, December 25
212-727-8110
www.whatshesaidmovie.com
filmforum.org

I would love to read Pauline Kael’s review of Rob Garver’s What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael, a documentary about the influential and pugnacious film critic who wrote about movies in her own unique, highly subjective way for nearly forty years. But the California-born Kael passed away in 2001 at the age of eighty-two, and we’ll never know. But in the film, which opens Christmas Day at Film Forum, we do learn about what many of her supporters and detractors, colleagues, fans (known as Paulettes), and targets thought of her. “We’re not talking about film criticism here; we’re talking about Pauline Kael,” explains writer and director Paul Schrader, who referred to Kael as his “second mother” in a 2001 Film Comment essay. “And, in the end of the game, what Pauline Kael promoted wasn’t film. It was her.”

Garver traces Kael’s career from her early days writing (ever-so-briefly) for McCall’s and the New Republic before moving to the New Yorker, where she covered “The Current Cinema” from 1968 to 1991, aside from a six-month hiatus when she attempted to produce a film with Warren Beatty for Paramount. Garver combines new and old interviews with Kael’s home movies and private photographs, television appearances, and narrated clips from her reviews and letters; among those discussing Kael and her work — the two are inseparable — are filmmakers John Boorman, Robert Towne, Quentin Tarantino, and David O. Russell, actor Alec Baldwin, writers Molly Haskell, Greil Marcus, Stephanie Zacharek, David Edelstein, Camille Paglia, Michael Sgragow, Joe Morgenstern, and Lili Anolik, and, seen in archival footage, Woody Allen, Norman Mailer (who referred to Kael as “lady vinegar”), Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Evans, Jerry Lewis, David Lean, and others. “Pauline could be very combative and very provocative and she could be cruel, for no reason,” Pulitzer Prize winner Morgenstern notes; Lean stopped making films for several years after Kael excoriated him at a luncheon.

We hear a lot from Kael, who split her time between New York City and her country home in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, through archival footage as well as narration by Sarah Jessica Parker, who reads excerpts from Kael’s personal and professional writings; in her last review, of Steve Martin’s 1991 film L.A. Story, Kael called Parker a “bouncy nymph.” While she was loathed by plenty of people inside and outside the industry, Kael was also beloved and needed by others. She says, “People don’t tend to like a good critic. They tend to hate your guts. If they like you, I think you should start getting worried.” Marlene Dietrich wrote to her, “I am quite lost without your opinions on films.” Directors such as Wes Anderson would send her their films even after she retired, just to hear what she thought. But her daughter, Gina James, notes, “There are times when people will tell me something that she said to them and I think, that’s impossible, and then I realize they couldn’t have made it up because it is just shocking.”

Garver (Comic Belief, The Man in the Yellow Cap) also includes snippets from hundreds of films; while the clips from such movies as Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine, Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music, Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande à part, Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour, Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, and Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War are effective because they are shown in context with her reviews of those films, the snippets are also overused as punctuation, adding an unnecessary exclamation point at the end of a sentence to drive home a point that is already clear. For example, when Edelstein states, “Pauline would write about something, and you would not only love reading it, but then you would want to see what she wrote about so you could argue with her, or you could relive it with her, you could see it through her eyes,” Garver follows that with a scene from Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver in which Robert DeNiro as Travis Bickle puts his fingers over his eyes as he watches a movie. It might be cute, but it’s also extraneous.

Ultimately, Garver’s main point is that love her or hate her, Kael, who left behind a vast legacy of her writings, including thirteen books (I Lost It at the Movies, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang), and had several unsuccessful relationships with men, changed how we approach film criticism and experience films themselves. “She turned the movie review, which is this kind of flimsy vehicle — it’s a thumbs-up or thumbs-down endeavor — into this expressive art form. I mean, it was as expressive as the short story or the sonnet,” writer Lili Anolik says. Film Forum is hosting several Q&As and panel discussions during the scheduled two-week run, with Garver December 26 and 27 at 7:00, December 28 at 4:30, and December 29 with composer Rick Baitz as well at 2:30, with Zacharek and Monica Castillo on January 2 at 7:00, and with Owen Gleiberman on January 4 at 4:30.