For those of us still pulling off the magic act of being paid (meagerly, of course) to scribble about movies in the 21st century, the presence of a documentary about one of our own, especially a figure as significant and divisive as Pauline Kael, proved too tantalizing to resist. Thus, of all the important films to enjoy their South Florida debuts at the Miami International Film Festival over the next week-plus, I selected Rob Garver’s What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael, a conventionally structured doc that is often as lively and compulsively engaging as its subject’s prose.
Second only to Siskel and Ebert’s deep implantation in the American consciousness, there is probably no critic in film history who was as read, or listened to, as Pauline Kael. (One exception may be Leonard Maltin, but I’d like to think the milquetoast musings in his annual Movie Guide, though a rite of passage for many of us, had as much sway as a 3 a.m. infomercial.) Certainly none were as hated as Kael, who received creatively sadistic death threats throughout her career. Then as now, to be a woman with a strong opinion — especially a countervailing one — was to open oneself up to the condescension, the dismissals, the mansplaining of her peers in yet another patriarchal industry.
And contrarianism was a powerful aspect of Kael’s literary identity. As this more-or-less linear journey through the critic’s professional life reminds us, from her very first review, she tipped sacred cows. Her debut as a film critic, in 1953, was a counterpoint against Charles Chaplin’s Limelight, published by City Lights alongside another critic’s more-praiseful assessment. She would go on to develop her voice — passionate, crackling, unapologetically subjective — first as a freelancer for publications such as McCall’s and The New Republic, and most influentially for The New Yorker for more than two decades. She loathed self-importance, existential ennui, the self-conscious art film. She slammed Resnais and Antonioni, 2001: A Space Odyssey and, of all sacrosanct masterpieces, Shoah.
On the flipside, she also, as this documentary asserts, “made Scorsese and Spielberg.” A champion of the New American Cinema, she famously resurrected Bonnie and Clyde from its initial death by a thousand pans. Her enthusiasm for violent, macho, oversexed cinema — “No critic had as much testosterone as Pauline,” offers Molly Haskell — is one of the ironies Garver nimbly explores in What She Said. By writing “like a man,” Kael helped confound and shatter whatever boundaries or gender expectations existed in some readers’ heads.
All of that said, Kael could also be full of it, and I found myself rolling my eyes at many of the excerpts Garver extracts to be read aloud (sometimes by Kael herself in archived audio, sometimes by Sarah Jessica Parker). In the famous inside-baseball feud between Kael and the Village Voice’s Andrew Sarris, into which Garver dutifully wades, I was always firmly ensconced in the Sarris camp. Sarris espoused the auteur theory and Kael rejected it, but more importantly, Sarris valued aesthetics, formalism and critical distance in his appraisals of a movie’s merit, where Kael prized acting, narrative and a film’s place in the zeitgeist. At the time, you only loved one or the other; Paulettes and Sarrisites were as divided as certain Bernie Bros and Hillary Bots in the 2016 primary.
Given auteurism and formalism’s high regard in the critical intelligentsia today, I believe Sarris won, though you could argue that his approach is less personal than Kael’s, and thus easier to adopt. (My greatest inspiration as a critic, Jonathan Rosenbaum, is a Sarrisite par excellance.) Kael’s voice was iconoclastic and, as with most trailblazing artists, inimitable.
Garver is most likely a Paulette, though not explicitly so. In his introduction to the Sarris spat, onscreen text dismisses Sarris as a critic “still finding his voice” upon the publication of his vital treatise Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962, which may arguably be true but feels like a superfluous jab. Kael’s personal life is given short shrift in Garver’s storytelling; her daughter, Gina, offers the insight that outside of work, Kael “couldn’t not be critical,” but Garver lets this comment hang in the air without any probing.
To his credit, Garver allows for moments of genuine hurt wrought by Kael’s words, particularly when she oversteps the boundaries of her profession — criticizing David Lean (for a film as mesmerizing as Lawrence of Arabia, no less) so aggressively to his face that it turned him away from filmmaking for a spell. “It shakes one’s confidence,” he remarks, in an archived video. And certainly, as Garver reminds us, her decrial of Shoah borders, if not swerves fully, into an ugly and unbecoming anti-Semitism.
Yet as the many interviewees of What She Said reveal — directors, actors, authors, fellow-critics — Kael’s legacy may be the bar she lifted for her profession. She doesn’t so much reflect a time when a critic had enough influence to make or break a film as she invented that time. Multitudes of smart people read Kael as zippy literature, even if they had little interest in the movies she was assessing; and if they shared that interest, they made informed decisions about their moviegoing based on her writing.
This, I’m afraid, is largely lost in today’s fragmented environment. I was waiting for the inevitable comparison of Kael’s voluminous reviews to the tweet-sized summaries and herd mentality of Rotten Tomatoes. When Garver provides it, it’s a sad reminder that while we currently have more people than ever writing about the movies, fewer than ever are getting deeper into them.
WHAT SHE SAID: THE ART OF PAULINE KAEL. Director: Rob Garver; Distributor: Cinetic Media; Rating: NR; Runs: March 2 at 3:30 p.m. at Coral Gables Art Cinema; March 7 at 7:15 p.m. at Silverspot Cinema 14 in Miami