Conversations with Pauline Kael by Will Brantley

Author:Will Brantley [Brantley, Will]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: University of Mississippi Press
Published: 1996-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

Passion of a Critic: Kael on Mediocrity, Risk and American Movies

Michael Sragow / 1985

* * *

From The San Francisco Examiner 18 December 1985: E1, E5. Reprinted by permission.

Ever since I got over the idea that a good reviewer is someone you always agree with, Pauline Kael has been my ideal as a movie critic. Writing in the New Yorker week after week for 18 years, she’s displayed the most reliable taste buds in the business, along with a knack for spotting incipient talent that verges on the sibylline.

But that’s not what makes her essential, which is the passion and intellectual commitment and aesthetic excitement that she conveys in her writing. Even when I object to 80 percent of her criticism of Heart Like a Wheel or her praise of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, I still admire the beautifully felt-out way she expresses her point of view.

State of the Art, her 10th book, is also her best in the 10 years since she came out with Reeling. (It’s a William Abrahams Book for E. P. Dutton, available in hardcover for $22.50, in paperback for $12.95.)

For reasons of publishing economics—her collections were becoming too big and thus too expensive—it covers two years (June 1983 to July 1985) instead of her usual three. And it features none of her famous overview pieces on the intersection of art and industry or on careers like Cary Grant’s and Orson Welles’.

She explains why in the interview below, which she gave at the Clift Hotel while touring for her book two weeks ago.

Her criticism here has a wonderful concentration—even, at times, a contemplative calm. In one essay after another, she combines her extraordinary alertness to the film at hand with a vast breadth of reference, a free-ranging wit and sometimes breathtaking descriptive prose.

The table of contents may list the movies she covers in her columns, but that doesn’t do justice to the variety of topics she covers in passing.

At the beginning of her Terms of Endearment review, for example, you can find the best appreciation of half-hour series on TV anywhere. Once again, she’s nonpareil at delineating acting styles, whether Steve Martin’s or Meryl Streep’s, and directing styles, too, whether David Lean’s or Satyajit Ray’s. And her reading of A Passage to India offers an original interpretation of E. M. Forster’s strengths and failings that sweeps away dusty schoolbook preconceptions.

Kael has been a consistent enemy of academics’ deadening effects—particularly the tendency to base opinions on classical authority. But the best way I can explain the special strength of her reviewing is to quote that master of journalistic criticism, William Hazlitt:

“In art, in taste, in life, in speech, you decide from feeling, and not from reason: that is, from the impression of a number of things on the mind, which impression is true and well-founded, though you may not be able to analyze or account for it in the several particulars . .

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