| Pauline Kael: An Appreciation | |
Influential film critic Pauline Kael died on September 3, 2001, at age 82, and her passing made me reflect on what her film criticism has meant to me. I never had the good fortune to see Kael in person, and I’ve only read a few of her articles in The New Yorker, where she wrote essays from 1967 to 1991. My knowledge of Kael comes mostly from reading her splendid books, particularly 5001 Nights at the Movies and I Lost It at the Movies, and my life has been immeasurably enriched for having read them.
Kael had a distinctive and bravely outspoken voice that was clearly her own, and she is one of only a handful of critics that I read for pleasure. Not just because of the writing itself -- which is always a treat -- but because she makes me think and feel. I often disagree with her, but that’s not the point. She was a good critic because she was someone you could bounce your own sensibilities off of and deepen your understanding of a movie along the way.
Kael sometimes had good things to say about some young directors who later became famous. About Spielberg’s Sugerland Express she wrote, "This is one of the most phenomenal debut films in the history of the movies." She thought that Scorsese’s Mean Streets was "a true original, and a triumph of personal filmmaking." She praised Coppola’s The Godfather, "The movie is a popular melodrama with its roots in the gangster films of the 30s, but it expresses a new tragic realism, and it’s altogether extraordinary." But when asked in a 1998 interview for Modern Maturity magazine her opinion of Oliver Stone’s work, Kael responded, "I despise his movies."
Kael could be harsh with films she didn’t like. She called Ryan’s Daughter, "Gush made respectable by millions of dollars tastefully wasted." About Doctor Zhivago she wrote, "It’s stately, respectable, and dead." She thought The Deer Hunter was "a romantic adolescent-boy’s view of friendship." And about Coming Home she wrote, "The movie, which started out to be about how the Vietnam war changed Americans, turns into a movie about a woman who has her first orgasm when she goes to bed with a paraplegic."
Kael liked Citizen Kane, writing that "it may be more fun than any other great movie." But she seemed to view Casablanca as more of a guilty pleasure: "It’s far from a great film, but it has a special appealingly schlocky romanticism." About Lawrence of Arabia she wrote, "This picture fails to give an acceptable interpretation of Lawrence, or to keep its action intelligible, but it is one of the most literate and tasteful and exciting of expensive spectacles." And what was her opinion of It’s a Wonderful Life? "This is doggerel trying to pass as art."
Kael sometimes liked foreign-language films -- for example, she called Grand Illusion "one of the true masterpieces of the screen" -- but she often found them pretentious. In her book I Lost It at the Movies, she has a provocative essay titled "The Come-Dressed-As-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties," where she expresses her dislike of La Dolce Vita, La Notte, and Last Year at Marienbad. Yet she declared L’Avventura to be "easily, the film of the year" in 1961.
Pauline Kael was unabashedly opinionated and had the courage of her convictions. Her film criticism was about as far from the breathless platitudes of the junket-circuit quote whores of today as anything can get. If I’m lucky, part of her unyielding critical mind will always be there somewhere in the back of my mind whenever I’m watching a movie.
