What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael Artfully Frames Famous New Yorker Film Critic
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B
Rob Garver’s new documentary, What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael is, to the best of my knowledge, only third feature film about film critics. The others are Steve James’ Life Itself (2014), about the late Roger Ebert, and Gerald Peary’s For The Love Of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism (2009).
The subject alone should ensure that it gets lots of attention from film reviewers and despite a jumpy, hodge-podge style, should be generally enjoyable to anyone interested in the seductive, contentious cultural phenomenon of The New Yorker’s famous critic.
The movie tosses together a lot of not-always-relevant vintage movie clips, interviews with both the famous (Quentin Tarantino, Paul Schrader) and less-famous subjects, along with snippets of Kael’s letters and writings, read in voice-over by Sarah Jessica Parker. Tracing the highlights and sore spots of Kael’s career, the movie works, essentially, as the illustrated version of Brian Keller’s 2011 biography, Pauline Kael: A Life In The Dark.
During her tenure at the New Yorker from 1968 to 1991, it’s fair to say that Kael helped shape modern film history, grooming an audience for the work of Arthur Penn, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman and Brian De Palma, among others. For a lot of her journalistic followers or “Paulettes” as they were known, she was the very model of the modern major movie critic. A witty, erudite dilettante who despised academic criticism, she put passionate engagement over “term-paper pomposity,” while trashing rivals and anything that bored her.
Sensual intensity (Bonnie and Clyde, Last Tango In Paris) nearly always won out against anything that was too earnest, from Michelangelo’s La Notte to Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. Although Kael’s epigrammatic, often insightful, grenade-tossing style is inimitable, that hasn’t stopped a couple of generations of reviewers of latching onto some of her bad habits. Those include those annoying generalizations about how “we” feel, and the habit of pretending to know more about filmmaker’s motives than is possible.
What She Said is at its most interesting when exploring the influences of Kael’s writing voice and scrappy temperament.
The daughter of a California chicken farmer, a college drop-out, and a single mom by 30, Kael had the iconoclastic attitude of born outsider. Inspired by the wisecracking style of screwball comedy heroines and literary wits like Dorothy Parker, she landed her first New York reviewing gig in 1953 when an editor overheard her holding forth on film at a coffee shop. She landed her New Yorker job when, in 1967, her employer, The New Republic, rejected her rave review of Bonnie and Clyde and The New Yorker agreed to run it. (Tellingly, the words “feel” or “feeling” occur 19 times in the review.)
As various commentators point out in the film, Kael had a mean streak; we see an archival clip of David Lean talking about how he stopped working for a while after Kael attacked him. (Her daughter Gina credits this to an odd lack of self-awareness. She meant well, why couldn’t others see that?) A celebrity herself, Kael was frequently on the receiving end of both adulation and vitriol as we see in a quick montage of letters from such names Marlene Dietrich, Steven Spielberg, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid director George Roy Hill (“Listen, you miserable bitch…”).
After she took a brief and ill-fated leave to work with Warren Beatty at Paramount, she and the zeitgeist began to go their separate ways. In June 1980, she wrote a famous essay called Why Are The Movies So Bad; Or, The Numbers lamenting the studio’s then-new blockbuster direction. A couple of months later, in 1980, Renata Adler’s published a famously brutal 7,646-word take-down of Kael in a New York Review of Books (“jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless”). The piece was more than Kale-level overkill; it resonated with a younger generation of film intellectuals who had grown weary of Kael’s snappy, contentious high-handedness.
Kael’s career as a major critic continued through the 1980s, a decade in an era when the movies got bigger but often seemed lesser. Meanwhile, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were creating a new popular template of what film reviewers did for a living, which involved thumbs. In 1998, three years before Kael’s passing, Rotten Tomatoes emerged, founded by a trio of undergraduates from Kael’s alma mater, University of California, Berkeley. What She Said is a reminder that Pauline Kael’s own movie response meter was always entirely her own.
What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael. Written and directed by Rob Garver. With Quentin Tarantino, David O. Russell, Camille Paglia, Paul Schrader, David Edelstein, Greil Marcus, Molly Haskell, Robert Towne. Now playing at Toronto’s Ted Rogers Hot Docs Cinema.