After the Tall Timber (43 page)

I do not mean for a moment to imply that every Kael review is in the vituperative or inquisitional mode. There are meditations of all kinds and, quite often, broad cultural allusions:

A word heap, surely. The quality of observation may be characteristic of people who insist that films be discussed in
visual
terms. I am not certain that Ms. Kael has a clear idea what a “Romanesque color” might be, particularly in the “faintly psychedelic” spectrum, and even in the most “pungent, viselike atmosphere”; but I’d like to stay for a moment, in two simpler sentences, with the visual, the cinematic eye.

On page 398, there is an “upper lip pulling back in a snarl” to reveal “yellow teeth like a crumbling mountain range.” On 436, on the other hand, there are “jagged lower teeth that suggest a serpent about to snap.” Now, the vision, it’s true, is consistent. But surely the mouths are peculiarly observed, or both the mountain range and the serpent are upside down.

There are allusions as well to literature. Ms. Kael likes to mention Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Shakespeare’s fools. “It’s like a classic passage in Tolstoy,” she writes, and before one can wonder Really? Which? she has dropped the subject. “We’re given the components of a novel at a glance,” she writes elsewhere, and fortunately drops that, too. But then:

One pauses. Can it be that there is actually a thought coming? Yes. It’s this:

I’ll spare you further references to literature and Tolstoy. I’ll skip most of the recurrent, indescribable reflections on “art” and “artists”: “When artists are raging, straining to express themselves,” or “If De Palma were an artist in another medium.” Their intellectual content ranges from “An artist can draw a lot of energy from obsessive material”—unarguable, certainly, and not carried further—to this baffling Kaelism: “They are not plagued by the problem of bourgeois artists. They have loose foreskins.”

Historically, it is hard to know what to make of the little italicized
eureka
in “Truffaut is romantic
and
ironic”; “romantic irony” occurs so early and often in any liberal education. But even in the cultural province she claims most confidently as her own, Ms. Kael can go puzzlingly astray. When she calls
King Kong
“marvelous Classics-comics,” for instance, it seems almost pedantic to recall that Classics Comics were, in fact, condensations of classic books, the Bible, say, or her beloved Tolstoy, not at all the genre that she seems to have in mind. As for allusions to racial or social developments, they tend to take a jokey form. “He’s an equal opportunity fornicator.”

There are also, however, ruminations of the highest order:

Too true. Several reviews later:

Perhaps less true.

I’d like to say here that I didn’t expect to find this, and I wasn’t looking for it. I now think that no one has looked at the
meaning
of these sentences, or at their intellectual quality, in many years. I have also postponed, in some ways I would rather have avoided, Ms. Kael’s critical characterizations of specific performers and specific films. These are always largely matters of personal taste. In addition, the mere mention these days of a specific movie can distract moviegoers, with the sheer vehemence of widely held opinions, from what is actually being said, and by what methods and techniques. That situation is only partially a result of Ms. Kael’s efforts. Most writing about films now contains a degree of overstatement, meaninglessness, obfuscation. I won’t dwell on the advocacy, if that is the word, of Peckinpah, De Palma, Coppola, but turn to very quiet ground:

I’m not sure this is an insight worth restating, or amplifying, three times in a single sentence (“pony,” “equine,” “horse”). I am quite sure it is not an insight, it is wrong, to write of the characters in
The Deer Hunter
, that “they’re the American cousins of hobbits.” Then:

It’s hard to know what to respond—except
Petulia
. Maybe Ms. Kael thought he was “nothing” in that film. Certainly, he was not “dominating” in it. Or:

This, I submit, is no longer a matter of doubt. The whole point of what was probably the most beautifully thought-out and acted scene in
Nashville
, and perhaps in any movie since, was that Carradine could have been singing to nobody but Lily Tomlin. Each of the female characters who mistakenly believed that he was singing to her—not, however, because of any tremolo, but because he had slept with her—was portrayed as smugly but touchingly obtuse. Each soon recognized that he was singing to somebody else—again, not on the basis of his tremolo but from the direction of his stare.

The only reason this matters in the slightest is that if any “you” would be led by Carradine’s voice to the mistake made by specific female characters in that scene in
Nashville
, then there is no reason why those specific characters, and they alone, should have made it. The scene utterly loses its point.

About
Coming Home
:

No one, I think, would disagree with Ms. Kael that the scene is the dramatic center of the movie; but it seems just as clear that one question that is
not
in the viewer’s mind is the one (or the two) Ms. Kael suggests. The question, if any, is another one, which has persisted almost from the movie’s start, and which Ms. Kael would have seemed uniquely designed, by temperament, to spot: What is it that Luke, the paraplegic, does in making love? This essentially clinical question is one that the movie deliberately suggests and then, I believe, dishonestly blurs throughout. Be that as it may, I don’t think a viewer in the world has in mind in that scene the question Ms. Kael ascribes to him. I happen not to have liked the movie, either. But, given the physical circumstances, I don’t think even Ms. Kael could have taken a cheaper shot, or one less apposite, than the last line of her review: “Are liberals really such great lovers?”

Let’s leave all that. Let’s leave her unusually many uses of the form so/that, such/that—from “so haughty that her name should be ‘Anastasia,’ ” “so endearing  . . . that he should be billed as Richard ‘Cuddles’ Dreyfuss,” “so grasping that the film should be called ‘Tentacles,’ ” through this sort of meander-hype connective:

Let’s leave aside her humor: “you feel she needs a derrick to lift her lids”; “each repositioning of her features requires the services of a derrick”; “you fight to keep your eyes open”; “people were fighting to stay awake”; “but after a while I was gripping the arms of my chair to stay awake”; “the audience was snoring”; “the only honest sound I heard  . . . was the snoring in the row behind me,” etc. Let’s leave even her favorite deep/surface dichotomy, or paradox, or whatever she thinks it is: a director, “deep on the surface”; a film, “deep on the surface”; “deep without much surface excitement”; “rough on the surface but slick underneath.” Let’s leave aside, in short, all the relatively harmless mannerisms and devices.

A more important, related stratagem recurs constantly in her work, and by no means in hers alone. I don’t know how to characterize it, except as the hack carom—taking, that is, something from
within
the film and, with an air of triumph, turning it
against
the film or a performer. “Gere looks like Robert De Niro without the mole on his cheek,” for instance, “but there’s more than that missing.” More than the mole. About a scene with a burning candle, “someone should have taken a lighted wick to [the scenarist’s] ideas.” About an actor’s expression within a role, “His face is stricken with grief and humiliation; that should be [his] face for what [the writer and director] do to him.” About a scene of begging for absolution, that the writer and director “ought to be the ones kneeling in penance.” Ms. Kael revels in this sort of thing. The only reason the device has any significance is the unpleasant, even punitive overtone—the notion that a film or a performer is not merely undistinguished, or unimportant, or untalented, but actually
guilty
of something. The image of filmmakers penitent is particularly congenial to her work. She speaks often, in this carom mode, of being “betrayed” and of what she (or “we”) can or cannot “forgive.” (“A viewer could probably forgive everything that went wrong”; “the script seems like a betrayal, of them, and of us.”)

Films and performers may be guilty. They may or may not be absolved. Audiences are also at risk. People who do not share, for example, her infatuation with the more extreme forms of violence are characterized as “repressive,” “acting out of fear, masked as taste,” “turned philistine,” “trying to protect themselves from their own violence,” “surely with terror and prurient churnings underneath?” “What may be behind all this,” she actually writes at one point, “is repression of the race issue.” An occasional film may be forgiven (really) as “not the sort of failure you write an artist off for.” But those fearful, repressive, philistine, secretly violent, racist, prurient people in the audience are not going to be forgiven until they come around.

Which brings me to the “we,” “you,” “they,” “some people”; “needs,” “feel,” “know,” “ought”—also to a structural mechanism I have seen in no other writer’s work. The structural mechanism first. Although it is true that Ms. Kael can hardly resist a restatement, or a repetition, or a meaningless amplification (“ditsey little twitches,” “ruthless no soul monsters”; “incomprehensible bitch,” “obnoxious smartass”); although she seems at times to have a form of prose hypochondria, palpating herself all over to see if she has a thought, and publishing every word of the process by which she checks to see whether or not she has one; it is also, equally, true that she can hardly resist any form of hyperbole, superlative, exaggeration: “poisonously mediocre,” “wickedest baroque sensibility at large in America.”

These predispositions—to restate and to overstate—make it all the more curious structurally that Ms. Kael withholds until the sixth long paragraph of one review the words “it’s Jack Nicholson’s best performance”; to the middle of the third paragraph of another the claim that Sophia Loren “has never looked more richly beautiful or given such a completely controlled great-lady performance”; to late in the fourth paragraph of yet another that Laurence Olivier “has the power to find something he’s never done before, in any role”; and to so unobtrusive a place that I could hardly find it when I looked for it again, the word that Paul Newman “gives the performance of his life—to date.” Now, it’s true, as I have remarked, that Ms. Kael rarely spares us an afterthought, or a forethought. But the structural reason for reserving these superlatives until so late in a piece becomes clear from the last example. Paul Newman’s “performance of his life—to date” was in
Slap Shot
. A film directed by George Roy Hill (whom she had mistakenly accused of failing to trouble to record
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
outdoors). What is operating here is the structure of spite.

“We” and “you” can occur, of course, in any writer’s work, in moderation. For the first two hundred pages, it seems that Ms. Kael means a sort of scolding nanny “we,” or a flirting schoolmarm’s, or a nondirective therapist’s, or a tour guide’s, or a prison matron’s. Consistent with the nanny, miffed, are remarks like, “She consented, but I was offended for her”; “I can’t help feeling that the audience is being insulted, although the audience doesn’t think so.” Also the repeated threats of what will happen “if” an actor, or a director, or a film “doesn’t pull” him or itself “together.” But then, there is something so pervasive and remorseless in that “we”—“we want,” “we resent,” “we feel,” “we’re desperate for,” “we don’t know how to react,” “we know too well what we’re supposed to feel,” “we want it, just as we wanted,” “we all
know
”—that the “we” becomes a bandwagon, a kangaroo court, a gang, an elite, a congregation, which readers had better join, or else be consigned to that poor group of deviants, sissies, aesthetic and moral idiots who comprise “some people,” “many people,” “a lot of people,” “those people,” “they.”

“You,” normally, is the individuated “we.” “You may wonder, Are these boys being naughty because they’re old enough not to be?” “You feel that some of your brain cells are being knocked out.” “You want the director to stop all the nonsense.” Sometimes, the “you” seems the subject of a hypnotist: “You feel that you understand everything that’s going on”; “You don’t feel embarrassed by anything that Clint Eastwood does.” But “you” is most often Ms. Kael’s “I,” or a member or prospective member of her “we.” As for “feel,” “needs,” and “know,” Ms. Kael uses “feel” variously, but most fervently in the emotional sense. She has, however, an odd view of what “emotion” is: “the one basic emotion he needs to show—sexual avidity.” So I’m not always certain what she means by “feel.” “Needs”: “He needs a little Terry Southern in his soul.” “Jimmy needs to be an exciting, violent, emotional man  . . . the pianist/gangster split as a heightened, neurotic metaphor for Everyman—a Dostoevskian Everyman.” “Know”: A film “doesn’t seem to know that that’s its theme”; a director “doesn’t seem to know what actors are for”; but “we all know” quite a lot of things; and “James Mason knows. God, does he know.” “Know” also often goes with a sort of culinary “needs”; “The film doesn’t seem to know that it needs a little playful sado-masochistic chemistry.” I think I’ll just skip “ought.”