She Also Found It at the Movies

ONE There are some film critics I read to get a sense of whether a movie is worth seeing and, perhaps, to get some idea of how I might approach a particular film. Over the last 25 years or so, the movie critic I have found most helpful in that regard is David Edelstein. I used to love reading his reviews at slate.com, and he often had a real influence over whether I would end up going to see a movie. But there are other reasons you might be drawn to film critics. I have never read Anthony Lane in the New Yorker to decide whether to see a film. I read him instead for the wit, the charm, the flair. Only Lane could write this of the titular figure of the 1999 film The Mummy, “If you made a nourishing winter soup out of white beans and Terminator, this fellow is what you would find at the bottom of the pot.” And then there’s a third set of film critics I turn to, this one consisting of three remarkable writers: James Agee, David Thomson, and Pauline Kael. These three I admire for the quality of their sensibility, the intelligence and the passionate attention that they bring to—well, first, to watching movies, and only then to writing about them. It doesn’t matter, it never matters, whether I agree with them. I have some especially strong disagreements with David Thomson. Some of his judgments are completely alien to my own. He loves some things that do nothing for me—primarily the work of The Archers (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger), which Martin Scorsese adores as well. So the fact I get nothing out of those movies probably says more about me than it does about them. Still, anything David Thomson writes about Powell and Pressburger I’m eager to read. Conversely, he intensely dislikes Billy Wilder, whom he thinks of as sour and cynical. He doesn’t think Billy Wilder is bad, but he thinks his screenplays and especially the movies that he directs are marred by cynicism. I think that’s a total misreading of Billy Wilder, but, again, I’ll read everything that Thomson says about him—or any other artist, for that matter. Maybe because he was a novelist and poet as well as screenwriter himself, I have a particular love for James Agee and his way of registering complicated responses, mixed feelings. I especially delight in his review of The Best Years of our Lives (1946): “At its worst,” he writes, “this story is very annoying in its patness, its timidity, its slithering attempts to pretend to face and by that pretense to dodge in the most shameful way possible its own fullest meanings and possibilities.” He goes on in this dismissive vein for some time: “In fact,” he writes, “it would be possible, I don’t doubt, to call the whole picture just one long pious piece of deceit and self-deceit, embarrassed by hot flashes of talent, conscience, truthfulness, and dignity.” But then, at the end of the review, he admits that he absolutely adored The Best Years of Our Lives and promises to write his next essay to explain why. That sort of investment of himself in watching movies, paying attention not only to the movies but also to what the movies do to him, how they affect him, and then writing vividly and precisely about the quality of his experience in the movie theater—all of that is simply extraordinary. Indeed, the only writer I find who can outdo Agee in that respect is Pauline Kael. I should add that Kael is completely useless to me as a guide to movies. If she loves something, I might love it or I might hate it. If she hates something, well, same thing. It’s not that we necessarily have opposing responses or opposing ideas. I simply cannot reliably map what I see at the movies onto what she sees. But that is not the point. I don’t read Pauline Kael to track my sensibility with hers on an aesthetic oscilloscope. I read her because I think she—more than any writer I know, including Agee—brings the whole of herself to writing about movies. And so the best way to think about Kael’s writing is not as movie film criticism; that would be a category error. She wrote in a known genre, but not that genre, whether she knew it or not. TWO Pauline Kael was not a nice person and probably not a good person. She was, many have reported, intolerant of dissent from her favored positions and persons, and, conversely, inclined to reward the sycophancy of younger critics, some of whom came to be called “the Paulettes.” Her fellow film critic Richard Schickel summed her up thus: Her breathy, noisy presence in screening rooms, where she was hell to sit next to, and in personal appearances and on TV, where she could be counted on to attack a fellow critic who did not, for example, share her enthusiasm for Jean-Luc Godard’s lesser works, would cause sharp intakes in breath from the audience. Very simply, she was a kind of performance artist, both on the page and in her presence, always shifting our attention to the drama of her thought processes. In writing her book on Citizen Kane she undoubtedly stole ideas and information from a film scholar named Howard Suber, ideas and information extracted from him with the promise—a promise she surely never intended to keep—that she would name him as the co-author of anything she wrote about Kane. If you ask anyone who Pauline Kael was, and they happen to know, they’ll tell you she was a film critic, someone who wrote for magazines, someone who cranked out her assessments on a regular schedule. However, by any reasonable criterion she did that job poorly. Her judgments were as arbitrary as they were high-handed; her capriciousness was matched only by her imperiousness. The very traits that earned her praise for one movie earned her condemnation for another. She was the sort of writer who regularly gets called “pugilistic.” Schickel complained that “Kael had no theoretical basis for her opinions.” After she panned the film Shoah, Leon Wieseltier dismissed her in no uncertain terms: “Pauline Kael is a moral idiot.” All these criticisms of her person and her work are true but, I submit, irrelevant. Twenty-five years after her death in 2001, and thirty-five after she retired from writing reviews, it is clear that Kael wasn’t a film critic at all. She didn’t write reviews, or even essays; rather, each of her “reviews” was a chapter in her autobiography—an autobiography written over decades and built not on a narrative arc but rather a long series of occasions. For Kael, movies become the occasions for writing the story of one’s life. And as an autobiographer she was a truly major writer, the Karl Ove Knausgård of her time and place—only more expansive and infinitely more interesting. If you were to put her decades of writing about movies between two covers, you’d have something quite a bit larger than Knausgård’s six volumes, and something that could with greater justice be called My Struggle. Her struggle, and also her nation’s, because she was also the chronicler of the several generations of Americans who found themselves, or lost themselves, at the movies. We may begin to find the key to her greatness, I think, if we return to something Richard Schickel said: “she was a kind of performance artist, both on the page and in her presence, always shifting our attention to the drama of her thought processes.” That’s true, I think, but one can give it a valence that Schickel declines to give it. We’re helped by noting a point that Sanford Schwartz, in his introduction to a collection of Kael’s writing on movies, identifies: What gives Kael a distinctive place in American writing, however, has as much to do with what movies prompt in her as it does with her capturing so much of the breadth and lore of movies. Following through on her conviction that movies release us from our normal emotional and social guardedness, she built her criticism, whether her subject is an epochal masterpiece or a tinny Hollywood product, on her most spontaneous and sensory reactions. And then, making the point that led me to conceive of this essay, Schwartz writes: In a body of work that as a result sometimes has the impact of a single long, indirect, and utterly original kind of autobiography, she immerses us in a flow of dazzlingly stated, unpredictable, sometimes needling and exhortatory, and always humanly large and forthright perceptions. That is to say: Kael was “always shifting our attention to the drama of her thought processes” because she was writing “a single long, indirect, and utterly original kind of autobiography.” And because she was an American of her generation, that autobiography could be told only through the experience of movies. One should think of her millions of words of movie reviews not as movie reviews but rather as chapters in her own story. Schickel says that “in a sense, she practiced criticism in much the same way that audiences leaving the theater after a film practice it. ‘I liked it,’ we say, or ‘I hated it.’” He means this point as a critique; it is better seen as the key to her importance as an autobiographer. What Kael’s autobiography centers on, I argue, is mixed emotions—a confused and ultimately irresolvable complex of responses to the story that the movies present to us—the story about our lives, especially as Americans, but really as citizens, or inmates, of the twentieth century. John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) she wrote, is “a mixture of reverie and reverence about the American past that made the picture seem almost folk art; we wanted to believe in it even if we didn’t.” Wanting to believe but not quite believing; questioning and doubting and yet also affirming and celebrating—this is Kael’s constant experience of the movies, and of being an American. The two experiences are, effectively, one. And now that her weekly schedule, and in many cases the movies she wrote about, have receded safely into the past, we have a chance to see her real achievement and value it for what it is. THREE