Rob Garver (2018)
BFI marked the centenary of Pauline Kael’s birth in June this year with an event, chaired by Isabel Stevens, at which she and a panel of three other writers on film – Adrian Garvey, Christina Newland and Francine Stock – discussed Kael’s work and influence, and took questions from the small audience the Reuben Library could hold. The panellists, each of them grateful to Kael for nourishing their interest in cinema, also shared an appealing balance of enthusiasm for her writing and exasperation with some of her judgments. The June ‘Big Screen Classics’ menu at BFI was also Kael-themed, comprising ten films she’d admired and/or championed. It was disappointing they couldn’t also screen What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael. Rob Garver’s documentary had shown at a series of international festivals in the preceding months; in the event, its British premiere was at the Edinburgh International Film Festival on 24 June – just after I’d left town. Thank goodness for the Bertha Dochouse at Curzon Bloomsbury, the one London venue where, more than two months on, What She Said is now showing. It was only after I’d seen it and got round to writing this note that I discovered what a struggle it’s been to get the film shown outside festivals at all.
What She Said moves at a terrific pace, chiefly through a combination of talking-heads talk and many snippets of films that Pauline Kael saw or reviewed. Rob Garver, who also edited, does honour to Kael by working up a rhythm and sense of abundance that captures something of the experience of reading her. The phrase ‘does honour to’ is wrong, though: its pompous ring is as absent from this documentary as it is from Kael’s writing. Also like one of her reviews, What She Said’s content and momentum make it thoroughly absorbing. As someone who often drowses at the start of a film and nearly always checks his watch well before it’s done, I was amazed when it was clear from the narrative this one was already nearly over. The ninety-five minutes fly by.
On the screen, there are, as well as the movie clips, extracts from TV appearances by Kael and from her home movies – including ones from the late 1950s/early 1960s, when her small San Francisco apartment became a centre of the local bohemia’s social life: these last are especially welcome for being so unexpected. The soundtrack often features Kael’s own voice, from her radio film review broadcasts for the KPFA station in Berkeley, California, as well as later interviews – so often that, when Sarah Jessica Parker reads extracts from the published work, you find yourself wondering for a second or two whose voice this is: you know it’s not Kael’s own. Parker reads intelligently, though. She echoes the accent and speech rhythms without mimicking them.
If you know Kael’s work and opinions well, some of the entries in the selection of film clips are also momentarily puzzling: you see a snippet of The Apartment, for example, and your instant reaction is ‘but Pauline Kael didn’t like that film …’ Your next reaction is to realise that, of course, that doesn’t matter. Garver often uses the extracts partly as a visual (or audiovisual) aid, with the characters or situations they feature reinforcing or ironising a point that Kael or another contributor is making. Besides, and no less important, the rapid succession of clips not only evokes the cinema that Kael experienced and wrote about. It also conveys the cornucopia her film writing is, and hints at the speed at which she wrote – although, as Paul Schrader sharply notes, she was rather fond of waiting to get a sense of the emerging critical consensus before developing her own, often contrary position.
Before he moved into screenwriting and directing, Schrader, who entered the UCLA Film School’s graduate programme with Kael as a referee, worked as a film critic. It makes sense that so many other members of Garver’s cast are writers – on film or in other cultural fields. They include (among others) Lili Anolik, David Edelstein, Molly Haskell, Greil Marcus, Joe Morgenstern, Camille Paglia, Carrie Rickey, Michael Sgarow, James Wolcott and Stephanie Zacharek. It would have been useful to give some sense too of Kael’s reputation in the non-anglophone world: perhaps Garver expects his audience to take it as read that her dislike of theory-driven film writing was anathema to, for example, Cahiers du Cinéma contemporaries. Most of the critics heard from are Kael enthusiasts, though Paglia seems to admire her style rather than her taste. Haskell is an exception but she’s used (thereby underused) chiefly to speak on behalf of her late husband, Andrew Sarris.
Garver largely restores the for-and-against balance through his choice of directors’ comments about Kael – from the likes of John Boorman, Francis Ford Coppola, David Lean and Ridley Scott. We see Woody Allen and Kael appearing together in a TV interview at a time when they still thought well of each other. What She Said is silent on Allen’s reaction to Kael’s skewering of Stardust Memories as the most flagrant example of what she saw as his increasing contempt for comedy – and for the audiences who preferred him to stick with comedy. As a complete reverse, we hear about Kael’s enthusiasm for The Godfather films but the sole contribution from Coppola is a sound clip in which, sounding bored, he describes Kael’s fruitless attempts to dissuade him from using ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ to score the helicopters in Apocalypse Now. Two directors whose short contributions are enthusiastic are David O Russell and Quentin Tarantino. You might think this is because they started film-making too late to be on the receiving end of Kael – or, at least, that the little she said about them was kind. Published interviews with her in the years after her retirement from regular reviewing include a few positive remarks about Pulp Fiction and Three Kings.)
Beyond the archive clips of Allen and Jerry Lewis (‘She’s never said a good word about me yet … but she’s probably the most qualified critic in the world’), the only performer interviewed is Alec Baldwin. Several actors are, however, among those whose letters to Kael, usually expressing either gratitude or fury, feature in a montage. She seems to have benefited greatly from annoying people whose responses are as solemnly self-important as she is blithely candid. In his letter to her, Gregory Peck (voiced by Mike Pollock) concludes that, ‘I suppose one day we shall meet. We may have a civil exchange of a sort. Or not. I will make that determination.’ Kael didn’t, to put it mildly, always have a high opinion of British cinema. (She usually used ‘English’ rather than ‘British’. Although plenty of Americans seem to think those are synonyms, Kael never wanted to deprecate the other home nations as much as England.) Its representatives here don’t do much to make you think she was being unfair to them. This wasn’t the first time I’d seen the interview with David Lean in which he describes being savaged by the New York Film Critics Circle generally and Kael in particular – at what he’d hoped would be an agreeable social occasion. What tends to get overlooked about this onslaught (and Garver doesn’t correct the oversight) is that its focus was Ryan’s Daughter. Ridley Scott (speaking in 2017) explains he was so hurt by Kael’s piece on Blade Runner that he’s never read any reviews since. Scott’s words are nearly drowned out by the sound of his crying all the way to the bank.
On the face of it, Garver’s title seems surprising. Notwithstanding the early radio broadcasts and, once she was a bigger name, television interviews, Kael is renowned as a virtuoso of the written, rather than the spoken, word. Garver soon persuades you his title’s right, though. Kael’s prose was anything but prosy: her style is vividly colloquial. As a recording quite early in the film’s narrative confirms, she consciously loosened up her writing because she wanted it to sound ‘like an American talking’[1]. It’s also well known – and What She Said mentions – that, when Kael tried her hand at writing plays, in the years before she was reviewing, the results were derivative, stilted and unperformed. She was altogether happier expressing herself in her own voice.
Kael famously loved films. The ten published collections of her reviews mostly have titles that bear a romantic or sexual interpretation, from first (I Lost It at the Movies) to last (Movie Love)[2]. Her disparagement of films that disappointed her – more specifically, those of directors whose work she’d previously praised – often read as the reactions of someone who felt personally betrayed. The BFI panel, although they discussed Kael’s championing of the early films of Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, said little about her subsequent disenchantment – and something similar happens in What She Said, which presents Scorsese and Spielberg, along with Robert Altman and Brian DePalma, as directors whose careers Kael’s enthusiasm helped take off. The only indication of her heartbreak at falling out of love with someone she’d adored comes in a quote from her post-retirement interview with Francis Davis (published in the book Afterglow) in which she explains that her decision to give up regular reviewing in early 1991 wasn’t caused only by her worsening Parkinson’s Disease:
‘That plus the fact that I suddenly couldn’t say anything about some of the movies. … The week I quit, I hadn’t planned on it. But I wrote up a couple of movies, and I read what I’d written, and it was just incredibly depressing. I thought, I’ve got nothing to share from this. … One of them was that movie with Woody Allen and Bette Midler, Scenes from a Mall. I couldn’t write another bad review of Bette Midler. … How can you go on panning people in picture after picture when you know they were great just a few years before? You have so much emotional investment in praising people that when you have to pan the same people a few years later, it tears your spirits apart.’
In spite of this, it’s important to keep in mind the limits of her movie love. She got into writing about films because she was good at it and passionate about them but Garver does well to include a recording in which she insists that she would always have felt much more deprived not reading books than by not seeing films. I’ve always kept in mind what she wrote in her review of Truffaut’s Day for Night:
‘Day for Night is a movie for the movie-struck, the essentially naïve – those who would rather see a movie, any movie (a bad one, a stupid one, or an evanescent, sweet-but-dry little wafer of a movie, like this one), than do anything else. It’s for those (one meets them on campuses) who can say, ”I love all movies.” It’s not for someone like me, who can walk out on A Touch of Class without a twinge.’
I’ve always struggled to understand why her ‘Raising Kane’ essay proved quite so contentious and why some consider it Kael’s finest piece of writing. (It doesn’t compare with many of her individual weekly reviews, let alone with their cumulative value.) Both points of view are represented in What She Said, the latter more briefly. As usual when the essay is discussed on screen (as it has been in documentaries about Orson Welles), Peter Bogdanovich puts in an appearance to deplore what Kael did. Over the years, the thrust of objections to the essay seems to have shifted from attacking her alleged magnification of Herman Mankiewicz’s contribution to Citizen Kane (at the expense of Welles’s own) to accusing Kael, more justifiably, of plagiarism. It’s hardly any longer a matter of dispute that she drew extensively on, without properly crediting, research by the UCLA academic Howard Suber into the development of the Citizen Kane screenplay. Rob Garver acknowledges this only perfunctorily.
In his biography Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark, published in 2011, Brian Kellow covered the Suber controversy in some detail. Kellow (who died in 2018) appears fleetingly in What She Said but it’s enough to remind viewers who’ve read his book that the portrait of Kael emerging from the latter is significantly different from Garver’s. A Life in the Dark, without making me think less of Kael as a writer and critic, left a strong impression that she’s better to read than she would have been to know. Garver’s title perhaps justifies his limited approach: concentrating on what Kael said, he doesn’t go deep into who she was. Even so, it’s hard to rid your mind of some of Kellow’s illustrations of her dislikeable behaviour.
In What She Said, the idea that Kael was, in some ways, an objectionable person comes through only in a suggestion that this was the subtext of Renata Adler’s notorious 1980 attack on her work in the New York Review of Books. Garver doesn’t pursue this, however. Although he makes clear that Kael was shocked and hurt by the attack, the possibility that Adler was expressing a deeper resentment is eclipsed in the reasonable conclusion that her invective was an eventually counterproductive attempt to out-Kael Kael. Adler’s denunciation of Kael’s review collection When the Lights Go Down as ‘jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless’ was not only OTT. It also reads as a pinch – minus the humour – from Mary McCarthy’s notorious putdown of Lillian Hellman: ‘Every word she writes is a lie, including “and” and “the”’.
Garver plays a touching recording made in 2000, the year before Kael’s death, of an unidentified child (a great grandchild?) asking her questions, including what is her all-time favourite film. She singles out Ménilmontant, a French silent movie (made in 1926 by Dimitri Kirsanoff). Elsewhere, What She Said covers several of Kael’s more notorious enthusiasms – on behalf of Bonnie and Clyde, Last Tango in Paris and Brian DePalma. This is a largely subjective judgment, influenced by one’s own opinions of the films in question, but the first of these campaigns stands up the best in retrospect. Her positive review of Bonnie and Clyde transformed the commercial fortunes of Arthur Penn’s film, which proved to be a watershed in Hollywood production history. The piece was also largely responsible for getting Kael the New Yorker job. At this distance in time, her championing of Bertolucci’s succès de scandale is harder to endorse – and Camille Paglia’s dismissal of Last Tango as offensive harder to disagree with. DePalma is more of a mixed bag. Stephanie Zacharek singles out Kael’s review of Casualties of War in 1989 as especially memorable to her: it is a fine piece of writing in praise of a fine film. Yet much of DePalma’s work also now seems to reflect Kael’s predilection for subversive, ‘sensuous’ violence – a taste that, in her later work, began to verge on automatic.
Garver tells his story in largely chronological order but with a few departures from it. This isn’t a problem if you know the dates of the films being discussed, still less of a problem if you’re already au fait with the details of Kael’s career. Even so, it would have helped to make explicitly clear that she was approaching fifty when she got the New Yorker job. What She Said rightly draws attention to – though it arguably exaggerates – Kael’s importance as a trailblazer for women in the largely male preserve of high-end film criticism. This comes through mostly in what others say, although there is an interview clip in which Kael herself asserts that the men in the circles she moved in found it hard to accept the idea of an intellectually formidable woman. To a greater extent, though, she was a feminist in deed rather than in word. The contributor to What She Said who makes you most keenly aware of the financial challenges Kael faced as a working single mother in the mid-twentieth century is, naturally enough, Gina James, her only child.
Although she didn’t exactly mistreat Gina, the evidence of A Life in the Dark suggests that Kael exploited her daughter’s loyalty and suppressed her independence. The picture of their relationship that Brian Kellow presents is one of the chief things in his book that makes it hard to like Kael’s personality. On camera, Gina, now seventy, has a self-effacing manner very different from her mother’s. She has real insights to offer. She remembers how Kael, in her declining years, hoped against hope that her health might somehow improve, and movies revive along with it. At a public memorial event, Gina acutely suggested that her mother’s biggest shortcomings as a person – a lack of self-awareness and inability to see how she could be hurtful when she didn’t intend to be – helped her to achieve such phenomenal freedom and eloquence as a writer.
In the BFI discussion, Isabel Stevens asked each panel member to kick off by summarising how they first came across Pauline Kael. The youngest panellist and the only American, Christina Newland got to know her work in circumstances rather different from her two British colleagues. What Adrian Garvey and Francine Stock described chimed with my own introduction to Kael’s writing. At sixty-one, Stock is a couple of years younger than me – I’d guess she and Garvey are around the same age. He produced a copy of Kael’s third collection, Going Steady, which he picked up in a bookshop on Charing Cross Road in the early 1970s. Stock first discovered her in copies of the New Yorker she happened upon; so did I, among the supply of magazines in the waiting room of our GP’s surgery.
It may not compare with Elizabeth Bishop and the National Geographic in the dentist’s waiting room but this discovery was for me an epiphany. I was probably sixteen, and had started regular cinema-going just a year or so previously. Kael’s New Yorker reviews were excitingly different from the ones I read in British newspapers and weeklies. Getting on for half a century later, I’ve still not come across another critic who matches her fusion of cogent analysis, wit and the sheer, dynamic sense of the experience of watching a particular film. Each of the BFI panellists was also asked to read out an extract from a favourite Kael review. Francine Stock chose Blue Velvet. After reading it (with beautiful fluency), she went on to express astonishment that Kael was capable of such writing after a single viewing. (Her persisting claim that she didn’t see films more than once, improbable as it seems, hasn’t, as far as I know, been disproved.) I knew just what Stock meant as she went on to describe the thrill of reading (and re-reading) Kael – a thrill you feel even when you disagree with her.
The BFI discussion included some speculation, as does What She Said, about how Kael would have fared as a critic in a world of blogs and tweets. On the one hand, she was famously pithy: she’d started off writing single-paragraph notes on films she showed when managing the Berkeley Cinema Guild in the late 1950s. On the other, the New Yorker eventually allowed her to write at exceptional length. On the question of what she’d have thought of movies nowadays, Isabel Stevens and her panel concluded pretty quickly that Kael would rather have spent time watching long-form TV than cinema fare. They also suggested that no critic of today could command the public reputation and influence that she came to enjoy. Interviewees in What She Said make the same point more emphatically but the precarious commercial status of Garver’s film raises questions about Kael’s own profile eighteen years after her death.
There’s no doubt she remains a divisive figure. This blog rarely attracts substantial comments but Pauline Kael figured in two of the exceptions. A response to my note on Sophie’s Choice, which complains about Kael’s victimisation of Meryl Streep, told me this said ‘more about you and your fanatical cult of Streep than it does about Kael’. My note on Sunday Bloody Sunday, on the other hand, was obviously written by a ‘Paulette’: the leveller of this charge proceeded to explain Pauline Kael’s all-round inferiority to Penelope Gilliatt (with whom Kael, for several years, shared ‘The Current Cinema’ duties on the New Yorker and who wrote the screenplay for Sunday Bloody Sunday). The explanation was sometimes daft – I was told, for example, that Gilliatt was very beautiful and an excellent horsewoman – but vivid evidence of the strength of feeling Kael can stir up[3].
Yet Rob Garver had to resort to crowd-funding earlier this year to help his film get a theatrical release after its festival screenings. Whether the fund-raising target was reached isn’t immediately clear from the What She Said Twitter feed but the latest news there (29 August) is good: ‘our film will be coming to theaters THIS DECEMBER’. Even so, it’s clearly been a struggle – compared with, for obvious example, the distribution of Life Itself, Steve James’s 2014 documentary about Roger Ebert. I hope Garver’s film gets more circulation in the UK than seems likely at present. The blurb on my copy of Kael’s first collection of reviews includes Saul Maloff’s words of praise in the Chicago-Sun Times: ‘Reading her is better than going to the movies’. For this film fan in the 1970s and 1980s, that was often true. What She Said – informative, entertaining and tonally spot-on – conjures up some of the exhilaration Pauline Kael’s writing inspires. It’s virtually an opportunity to read her and go to the movies at the same time.
7 September 2019
[1] Later on, there’s a brief montage of Kael quotes on films. Each one appears under a ‘What She Said’ heading. The logo is a miniature image of the portrait of Kael that appears on the publicity for Garver’s film. I inferred from this that ‘What She Said’ is now the name of a website that posts her choicest turns of phrase. If so, I haven’t been able to track it down.
[2] Even among the three titles whose implication is less obvious, two suggest either dizziness (Reeling) or addiction (Hooked). The sole outlier has a title (State of the Art) so different from the others that its seriousness seems intended as a joke.
[3] I rather regretted not accepting either of these comments for posting on Old Yorker. Unfortunately, both included insults worse than cult-of-Streep member and Paulette. I didn’t think it right either to promote name-calling or to edit before posting.
