The perils of being Pauline

PAULINE KAEL: A LIFE IN THE DARK By Brian Kellow 418 pages Available at National Book Store

s it a possible to write a sympathetic biography of a critic? IÕm not sure; one thinks of Anto Ego, the hard-to-like food critic in Ratatouille. The vocation seems to invite peeved recollections from those who have suffered the criticÕs tongue lashing at some point. Famed movie critic Pauline Kael is no exception. From 1968 to 1991, Kael was the doyenne of Þlm criticism for The New

Yorker (well, co-doyenne; she shared her column duties at ÒThe Current CinemaÓ with Penelope Gilliatt). But she was much more than that; she became perhaps the first superstar movie critic, one with legions of fans lining up to buy her essay collections like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and I Lost It At The Movies, sending her mountains of fan mail and calling her up to share their opinions about Þlm.

In this age when everyone is a critic Ñ and the Internet ensures that most people have access to not only a limitless downloadable Þlm library, but an online pulpit from which to preach Ñ itÕs a little hard to conceive of KaelÕs lofty perch back in the 1970s.

Perhaps itÕs best illustrated by an anecdote in A Life in the Dark, Brian KellowÕs biography of Kael, when sheÕs dining with cartoonist Al Hirschfeld and director Sydney Lumet, the set of whose 1966 Þlm

The Group she had just visited. Hirschfeld, noting that Kael was pretty drunk, got into a lively debate about movie criticism and asked her what she thought a criticÕs job was. ÒMy job, Ó Kael memorably snapped, pointing at Lumet, Òis to show him which way to go.Ó ItÕs hard to imagine that kind of chutz-

IMovie critic Pauline Kael could get very personal about directors, actors and actresses, and fellow critics. You didn’t want to be the recipient of her withering wit.

pah in a Þlm critic these days Ñ until you recall that the Internet and its legion of Þlm geeks (sites like AinÕt It Cool) are nowadays even more irreverent towards directors and Hollywood. They do think they have a web-given right to lecture Þlmmakers. And perhaps thatÕs one of the main points of A Life in the

Dark: what Pauline Kael, with her Midwestern background, represented to the established world of newspaper and magazine criticism was a gloves-off approach; she was so passionate about Þlm that her columns took on a messianic zeal which gained her, and eventually lost her, a lot of followers.

Along with the zeal came an erosion of civility. KaelÕs writing could get very personal about directors, actors and actresses, and fellow critics. You didnÕt want to be the recipient of her withering wit. When she carped about the sound quality in George Roy HillÕs Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in a 1969 review (claiming it had Òthe dead sound of a studioÓ), the director didnÕt take it lying down: ÒListen, you miserable b*tch,Ó he wrote Kael, ÒyouÕve got every right in the world to air your likes and dislikes, but you got no goddamn right at all to fake, at my expense, a phony technical knowledge you simply donÕt have... You donÕt like the sound, say so, but cut out that bullsh*t about how you know where it was done and made.Ó

Reportedly, Kael would read HillÕs letter out loud to friends with a gleeful cackle.

Her prose was probing yet direct, like she was sitting in the cinema seat right next to you. She often opened her reviews with a rhetorical question, as though summing up the cultural zeitgeist or the matter on everybodyÕs mind. She had a habit of using ÒweÓ instead of ÒIÓ when voicing her opinions on, say, Jane Fonda or Paul Schrader, as though she were speaking for the culture at large. At times, she did. She was a cultural icon, a celebrity, and it wasnÕt just because she had the biggest voice. She genuinely felt she had her Þnger on the pulse of what movies should be, and she grounded this feeling not on strong critical theory, but on audience reaction: in her reviews Kael tended to mention how this or that audience was reacting to a movie, as though this summed up the moviegoing public.

All of this would be damning if she wasnÕt usually correct in her opinions. Not ÒcorrectÓ as in Òpolitically correct,Ó but gifted with insight into the heart of Þlmmaking. And she expressed it better and more entertainingly than most other movie critics.

It helped that Kael emerged at a time Ñ the early Ô70s Ñ when Hollywood was in the midst of a revolution: for a short time, a new breed of directors and actors seemed ready to overthrow the studio system. Coppola, Bogdanovich, Scorsese, Altman, Woody Allen, William Friedkin Ñ they were the new rock stars, and Hollywood, for a while, kowtowed to their whims. And the Þlms got better and better. How could Kael not shine, even explode with joy, while reviewing The Godfather, M*A*S*H, Last Tango in

Paris, Chinatown, Taxi Driver, Nashville and others? This was easy stuff to cheerlead.

But the going got rougher when Kael began to lose her objectivity. Some say it was her 1972 review of BertolucciÕs

Last Tango in Paris when she Þrst started going off the rails. She swooned over the metaphysical Brando flick and its extreme sex, but the Þlm divided critics. She coddled certain directors Ñ such as Brian De Palma, Sam Peckinpah and Robert Altman Ñ who became her friends. She could see no wrong in giving them too much credit for a ÞlmÕs brilliance, even though she spent her early career tearing into other Þlm critics who put too much stock in Òauteur theory.Ó She was peculiarly blind to the merits of, say, Alfred Hitchcock, who she considered a "prestidigitator" who pushed the audienceÕs buttons, rather than a true artist.

When does a critic cross the line? In KaelÕs case, it was probably when she took a six-month leave from The New

Yorker to go to Hollywood and try her hand at producing scripts in the early Ô80s. Her blunt nature quickly alienated her from Hollywood execs Ñ the sort of creatively barren hucksters typiÞed by Don Simpson or Tim RobbinsÕ character in The Player. She soon realized she had less power over movies in Hollywood than she did back in New York.

With her plainspoken prose, Kael managed to piss off New YorkÕs snobby elite critics, as well as feminists, Jews and homosexuals at one time or another. All this gradually chipped away at her reputation Ñ or maybe itÕs because she championed movies like De PalmaÕs

Dressed to Kill and PeckinpahÕs Convoy beyond all proportion. But Kellow Þnds another culprit: by the Ô80s the movies just got less interesting. And when the movies were less interesting, Pauline Kael was less interesting. In the end, it was really what kept her going.