For the legend of Kael, unlike that of other critics, derived as much from her quirks and blind spots as from her gifts. We knew she refused to see any movie more than once. We knew she could push her judgments to untenable extremes. (Could any movie have merited the encomium she lavished on “Last Tango in Paris”?) She encouraged the adulation of younger critics — the much-mocked “Paulettes” — and abandoned any pretense of critical detachment by befriending directors such as Sam Peckinpah and Robert Altman and then pushing (and sometimes panning) their work in print.
Indeed, until I read Kellow’s biography, I hadn’t realized quite how embedded Kael was in the film industry, chatting it up with Barbra Streisand, vetting the scripts of “Taxi Driver” and “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” long before they went into production, and lobbying Stephen Frears to cast Michelle Pfeiffer in “Dangerous Liaisons.” (Good move.) Seen in this light, her brief and disastrous stint as a producer for Warren Beatty was a natural extension of her love-hate relationship with the Dream Factory — and, it must be added, her inability to maintain boundaries, either in art or in life.
(Viking) - ’Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark’ by Brian Kellow
But what, finally, is the source of any critic’s value? Not simply her judgments, which falter and date, but how those judgments are expressed. And that’s why Kael still matters. Open “5001 Nights at the Movies” or the new Library of America collection of Kael’s writings, and you’ll find, on every page, something that makes you laugh out loud or opens up a new space in your brain. Three examples, chosen at random. Ingrid Bergman’s “good, solid” psychoanalyst in “Spellbound,” “dispensing cures with the wholesome simplicity of a mother adding wheat germ to the family diet.” From a review of “Bloodbrothers” (1978): “Richard Gere is to De Niro and Brando what the singers in ‘Beatlemania’ are to the Beatles.”
And from a review of “Weekend”: “Godard has already imposed his way of seeing on us — we look at cities, at billboards and brand names, at a girl’s hair differently because of him. And when others pick up the artifacts of his way of seeing, we murmur ‘Godard’ and they are sunk. . . . They do what Godard himself has already gone past, and the young filmmakers look out-of-date before they’ve got started; and their corpses are beginning to litter the festivals.”
bookworld@washpost.com
Louis Bayard is a novelist and reviewer. His most recent book is “The School of Night.”
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