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Magazine
The movie lover's companion
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Pauline Kael wasn't just any critic. She had, what PRADEEP SEBASTIAN calls an uncanny, marvellous knack to spot the little film that the others had allowed to get away.
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Pauline Kael ... deft and accurate.
"There is nothing quite like that moment when the lights go down and all our hopes are concentrated on the screen."
ALRIGHT — so she was reckless in both praise and damnation; too polemical, hectoring, slangy, subjective, truculent, cantankerous and seldom saw a movie more than once. But, good grief — did it really matter? Her writing blew away all the bad karma of dull, joyless, academic film criticism and replaced it with writing that matched the giddy high excitement of the movies themselves. Hers was the first passionate critical voice. She, and she alone, among critics seemed to know what movies could do to you — send you reeling, wound you, confuse you, leave you helpless with anger and fill you with love. "Our emotions rise to meet the force coming from the screen," she wrote, "and they go on rising throughout our movie-going lives. It's a fusion of art and love."
Pauline Kael wasn't just any critic — she was the movie lover's critic. While other critics believed in being `objective', measured and sober, Kael was singing — rock star style: belting out what movies made her feel in a heady, lyrical, sensual voice that trembled with passion. This is a voice I know, I told myself, when I first heard it — it's my voice, too. No, no, I don't mean I could write like that — even remotely — or ever will: what I meant is, that voice echoes in me, the movie lover. In the same way it reverberates in movie lovers everywhere. "he romance of movies,"she wrote, "s not just in those stories and those people on screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what you've seen."It was in her writing that we heard articulated for the first time the sensual experience of watching a movie.
"You have to be open to the idea of getting drunk on movies," she once wrote. Having got high on them myself in the early 1980s (hailing from Bangalore, I felt exiled in Madras Christian College, Chennai, and escaped every Saturday to the American Centre Library and there stumbled on her When The Lights Go Down) I found in her a fellow drunk, friend and a critic I could trust. "Being able to talk about movies with someone is enough for a friendship," she said. (Yet she knew that "if you disagree too many movies it's hard to sustain a friendship"). What drew me closer to Kael was also a particular movie sensibility I shared with her — the special feeling she had for the small, underrated, personal film. She had this uncanny, marvellous knack to spot the little film that the other critics allowed to get away. (And you could always count on her to put the latest over praised sensation in its place). Almost every critic reviewed the great films and the stinkers but Kael alone zeroed in on, and trumpeted, the little gem lost or hidden to the others; devoting several beautiful paragraphs to make it glow. She wrote about them with joy and something close to love. Many of the films she picked out (during her New Yorker days and after she had retired from reviewing) for special praise have now become my personal faves: Brian De Palma's "The Fury", Philip Kaufman's "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", Alan Parker's "Shoot the Moon", Gavin Millar's "Dreamchild", James Bridges' "Mike's Murder", Louis Malle's "Uncle Vanya", Fred Schepisi's "Six Degrees of Separation" and "The Russia House", Al Pacino's "Looking for Richard" and Robert Altman's "Vincent and Theo". And, to my delight, I found myself agreeing with her on the overrated ones: "The Piano", "Unforgiven", "Good Fellas", "Casino", "Naked", "The Crying Game", "Barton Fink" and "Schindler's List".
Neither was the small performance or the small actor lost on her. When she wondered, 10 years ago, if Morgan Freeman was the greatest living American actor, she knew it was indulging in a bit of hyperbole. But it was her way of getting us to notice him. Her analysis of acting styles was deft and accurate — nobody could nail a performance the way she could. (We mustn't forget that Pauline Kael was the critic Meryl Streep said she would kill if she could). She caught the essential Brando in just a few lines when she wrote in her "Godfather" review: "The character is all echoes and shadings, and no noise; his strength is in the armour of quiet. Brando has lent Don Vito some of his own mysterious, courtly reserve: the character is not explained."
Her writing validated two things for me: that it was right to feel so intoxicated by movies and that it was okay to write about them in a personal way. It was she who taught me to trust my instincts on a movie. To ignore the critical consensus on a film and go with what I felt. "It becomes a sort of intuitive process," she said of film criticism. "You have to trust your instincts. What else have you got? The judgments we can usually make for ourselves." It's taken me 10 years of writing on cinema to see how true this is. To see that there isn't anything like an impersonal `objectivity' out there; that when you prefer one film over the other, it's mostly very personal: the way your sensibility is shaped, your prejudices, your past and your private obsessions. "You must use everything you are and everything you know," was her credo.
Once, after having just broken off with her lover, Pauline Kael went to see Vittorio De Sica's "Shoeshine". Coming out of the theatre she was in tears, she recalls in her review, but she didn't know if she was crying over the movie or because she had lost him. By some incredible coincidence her lover too had gone to see "Shoeshine" the same day and had emerged crying. "Yet," she writes, "our tears for each other, and for `Shoeshine' did not bring us together. Life, as `Shoeshine' demonstrates, is too complex for facile endings." By making herself vulnerable to movies and life in her writing, she showed us — more than any film critic has — why no other art form has touched life the way movies have.
The author is a freelance journalist based in Bangalore and is a bibliomaniac and bibliomane.
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