Pauline Kael (48 page)

“Fear of Movies” also included Pauline’s sharp observations of Woody Allen’s latest,
Interiors
, a study of a well-educated, upper-middle-class WASP family of New Yorkers that has been unraveling for years. The film’s dialogue, which managed to be both arid and archly literary, and the austere, earth-toned production design and conspicuously somber, sedate direction and photography, along with its concerns with the problems of a group of intellectually striving Manhattanites, all added up to a movie that seemed to Pauline as if its director was desperately begging to be taken seriously. She wondered, “How can Woody Allen present in a measured, lugubriously straight manner the same sorts of tinny anxiety discourse that he generally parodies?” To her, the film’s presentation of a WASP dilemma was a mask for classic Jewish concerns. “Surely at root the family problem is Jewish: it’s not the culture in general that imposes these humanly impossible standards of achievement—they’re a result of the Jewish fear of poverty and persecution and the Jewish reverence for learning.”
Interiors
was “a handbook of art-film mannerisms,” and she feared that in the end, Allen’s obsession with repressive good taste “is just what may keep him from making great movies.” (In this, she turned out to be amazingly prescient.) Pauline was delighted to have the chance to overturn the “official” verdict of Penelope Gilliatt, who had reviewed
Interiors
in
The New Yorker
only weeks earlier, saying of Allen, “This droll piece of work is his most majestic so far.”

Pauline was also displeased with Robert Altman’s latest,
A Wedding
. The movie had probably come about for all the wrong reasons: While Altman was shooting
Three Women
, a reporter from
Mother Jones
had asked him what he was going to film next; exasperated with her vapid questions, he recalled, he answered, “A wedding.... I’m taking this crew, and we’ll be doing weddings. Somebody gets married, and we’ll go and film it. I was really shitty. About that time we broke for lunch, and I went into this motel room with two or three other staff, and I said, ‘You know, that’s not a bad idea.’”

In
A Wedding
, it appears that Altman wanted to accomplish something similar to what he had achieved in
Nashville
—a revealing inside look at a bedrock American institution. Like
Nashville
it featured a big, attractive cast (including Carol Burnett, Vittorio Gassman, and Mia Farrow), but it had too many characters—forty-eight compared with
Nashville
’s twenty-four—and the film’s tone this time was sour, not generous, without
Nashville
’s constant surprises and twists. To Pauline, it was “like a busted bag of marbles—people are running every way at once.” She objected to its condescending tone: Altman, she felt, “doesn’t like the characters on the screen; he’s taking potshots at them, but he doesn’t show us what he’s got against them.” The movie’s cynical tone saddened her, and her disappointment in Altman was crystallized by her choice of a title for the review—“Forty-eight Characters in Search of a Director.”

Pauline’s growing disappointment in the movies she had been seeing had an odd, dispiriting effect on those who loyally read her each week. While there was truth to the accusation that her writing at times became hyperbolic, those reviews from the early to mid-’70s continued to convey an enthusiasm that was addictive. By the fall of 1978, however, many of her readers may have felt that they were experiencing withdrawal from a powerful drug. The great champion of the creative flowering of earlier in the decade took it personally that that period seemed all but over, and at times, her writing showed it.

She was, however, in excellent form with her review of Ingmar Bergman’s
Autumn Sonata
. It was a prestige project, a work by an acknowledged master that also featured a topical theme—the bitter conflict of a mother and daughter.
Autumn Sonata
told the story of Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman, in her first film with the director), a famed Swedish concert pianist who goes to visit her daughter, Eva (Liv Ullmann), married to a country parson. The daughter is a study in pent-up rage, which she blames on her mother’s years of neglect.

The critics, many of them impressed by the mere idea of a collaboration between the two Bergmans, were generally respectful of the film, although most of the praise was qualified; Andrew Sarris, for one, admitted that at some point he “began tuning out on Eva’s tirade.”
Autumn Sonata
was the kind of story Pauline was temperamentally disposed to dislike. She resented that Bergman presented Eva’s point of view “as the truth. Not just the truth as she nearsightedly sees it but the truth.” The audience was given no real opportunity to see Charlotte’s point of view, and as a result, the movie seemed like a long, shrill whine. “It’s like the grievances of someone who has just gone into therapy—Mother did this to me, she did that to me, and that and that and that,” Pauline wrote. “Eva is vengeful and overexplicit and humorless; she takes no responsibility for anything. Without any recognition of the one-sidedness, Ingmar Bergman lays it on so thick—makes it all so grueling—that we have to reject it.”

It was unquestionably a genuine reaction to the movie’s point of view—but it could hardly have escaped the attention of those close to her that the relationship between Charlotte and Eva bore certain resemblances to that between Pauline and Gina. Pauline’s daughter had developed into a lovely woman who looked far younger than thirty and had retained her gentle, soft-spoken manner. (Pauline’s friend the writer Martha Sherman Bacon observed in a letter that Gina resembled a Gainsborough portrait,
A Child of Quality in Peasant Dress
.) Mother and daughter’s relationship had had its fractious moments at various points in the past few years. By now Gina had given up dance and become seriously interested in painting. Outwardly, Pauline seemed very supportive of her work. But the silver cord remained as tightly attached as ever, and Pauline could commit herself to Gina’s creative interests only to the point that they didn’t threaten her own needs for her daughter’s time and attention. Simultaneously, she encouraged Gina and worried that she might abandon her. Many friends felt that if Gina had expressed a desire to pursue a career as an artist elsewhere, Pauline would have done her best to dissuade her from it. She had simply grown too accustomed to having her daughter close by. Carrie Rickey remembered a phone conversation between her own mother and Pauline in the mid-’70s in which Pauline stressed how important it was for mothers to meddle in their daughters’ lives and set them on the right path.

Some who were close to the two women felt that Gina had assumed the mother role at times: Whenever Pauline drove herself with deadlines, drank too much, and didn’t get enough sleep, Gina would urge her to maintain a better health regimen and take care of herself. Pauline had become friendly with a young movie-lover named Al Avant, who later angered her by gently encouraging Gina to go her own way. “He was always pushing her to get out and start her own life and pointing out to her that Pauline was dominating her life, which was true,” said Richard Albarino. Eventually, he recalled, Al Avant “was cast out in no uncertain terms. Pauline didn’t mind people being friendly, but she objected to him counseling Gina into active rebellion against her, because she totally depended on Gina.”

 

In addition to her growing dissatisfaction with the run of new movies, Pauline was not particularly happy with her situation at
The New Yorker
. She continued to do battle with William Shawn over tone and language in her copy, and after more than ten years of the same arguments, she was suffering from battle fatigue. Shawn, for his part, was just as exasperated as he once had been about Pauline’s insistence on using sexual and scatological language that he deemed inappropriate for the magazine. Their arguments had lost none of their sting over the years; as always, Pauline seemed to enjoy pushing Shawn to the limits, trying to find a crack in his gentlemanly decorum. “I can remember a couple of times, at least, seeing him turn so red when they would start arguing,” remembered William Whitworth, who served as Pauline’s immediate editor for a time in the 1970s. “She would never let it go. Shawn had had a heart attack, and I thought a couple of times that he might fall over on the floor right there in the office. She was the only person in the process who didn’t treat him the way the world of journalism did, and the way the rest of us did, as a very special little person—which he was. She treated him like one of the guys and talked to him that way, with a lot of wisecracks.”

One memorable confrontation with Shawn came in late 1978, when Pauline submitted her review of
Goin’ South
, a raucous Western comedy starring and directed by Jack Nicholson. “The problem Shawn had with her over and over had to do with her trying to sneak naughty words into the text and being really overtly, lip-smackingly appreciative of any sexual situations in the movie and wanting to make those as vivid as possible,” said Whitworth. In the opening sentence of her review of
Goin’ South
, Pauline rendered a vivid description of Nicholson, an actor she was still trying to come to terms with: “He bats his eyelids, wiggles his eyebrows, and gives us a rooster-that-fully-intends-to-jump-the-hen smile.” Shawn’s note in the galley margin read, “This piece pushes her earthiness at us, as if she wants to see how far she can push us, too. It’s the tone of the whole review.”

Later in the same review she wrote of the actor, “He’s like a young kid pretending to be an old coot, chawing toothlessly and dancing with his bottom close to the earth.” Shawn wrote in the margin, “Her earthiness, her focus on body functions.” The description of Nicholson’s bottom being close to the earth was deleted, as was a later reference to Nicholson’s being “a commercial for cunnilingus.” Shawn circled the phrase and wrote, “This has to come out. We can’t or won’t print it.” Whitworth recalled that in all the years he worked at
The New Yorker
, he never saw Shawn make such an adamant decree; it was his customary style to try to get his way via gentle persuasion.

Late in 1978 a film was released that Pauline thought had a good deal of the guts and vision that the decade’s greatest films had shown. Michael Cimino’s second feature,
The Deer Hunter
, concerned a group of Pennsylvania steel-mill workers whose lives are shattered by their experience serving in Vietnam. Robert De Niro starred as the distant, mysterious Michael, who saves his buddy Nick (Christopher Walken) when they are captured by the Vietcong and, in the movie’s most harrowing sequence, forced to play a deadly game of Russian roulette. As a director, Cimino was not afraid to be expansive: the Russian Orthodox wedding sequence, which became famous, went on for twenty-five minutes. (Rutanya Alda, who played the bride, Angela, recalled that the filming of it required sixteen- and eighteen-hour working days, with Cimino shooting all of the rehearsals to catch the most spontaneous moments.) Pauline thought the film’s “long takes and sweeping, panning movements are like visual equivalents of Bruckner and Mahler: majestic, yet muffled,” and that despite its structural flaws, it was “an astonishing piece of work, an uneasy mixture of violent pulp and grandiosity, with an enraptured view of common life—poetry of the commonplace.”

Jane Fonda, while campaigning for her own Vietnam project,
Coming Home
, spoke out angrily against
The Deer Hunter
because of its depiction of the Vietcong, and despite her enthusiasm for the film Pauline was inclined to agree, finding it one of the few big Hollywood movies of the era to display a right-wing sensibility, in which Cimino betrayed “his xenophobic yellow-peril imagination. It’s part of the narrowness of the film’s vision that there is no suggestion that there ever was a sense of community among the Vietnamese which was disrupted.... The impression a viewer gets is that if we did some bad things over there we did them ruthlessly but impersonally; the Vietcong were cruel and sadistic. The film seems to be saying that the Americans had no choice, but the V.C. enjoyed it.” She guessed that many would dismiss the movie because of its “traditional isolationist message: Asia should be left to the Asians, and we should stay where we belong, but if we have to go over there we’ll show how tough we are.” Yet despite her reservations, Pauline could see that
The Deer Hunter
showed evidence of tremendous artistry. Once more she had plenty of praise for Robert De Niro, who had developed into an actor capable of illuminating an opaque character. “We have come to expect a lot from De Niro: miracles,” she wrote. “And he delivers them—he brings a bronze statue almost to life.” (In later years, Pauline’s friend Daryl Chin would tease her about her early support of De Niro, saying, “Pardon me—he’s someone you babysat!”)

Her review of
The Deer Hunter
was one of the most vital pieces she had written in some time, demonstrating again her Agee-like talent for working out her feelings on the page. The future
Entertainment Weekly
film critic Owen Gleiberman was still a student at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor when Pauline’s review of
The Deer Hunter
appeared. “When I see something as huge, as rich, and as garbled as
The Deer Hunter
, regardless of how secure I am with my own feelings,” Gleiberman wrote to her, “I feel slightly off balance until I get a look at what you had to say. And what you’ve said has, I believe, made a difference in my life.”

At year’s end Pauline saw the most purely enjoyable movie she’d seen in years—Philip Kaufman’s remake of the 1956 low-budget science fiction classic
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
. The original version, about a community being systematically supplanted by pods from outer space that hatch perfect, desensitized human replicas, had been a surprise hit when it was released and was still a favorite in campus revivals, as it had come to be read as a biting commentary on the McCarthyist paranoia of the ’50s. The remake swapped the original’s small-town California setting for San Francisco but retained the paranoid atmosphere.