Pauline Kael (59 page)

Her colleague Jane Kramer at
The New Yorker
agreed with her about
Shoah
. “I hated it,” Kramer recalled. “I just thought, the poeticized landscape, the heavy symbolism. When you think that it followed a movie as brilliant and intimate as
The Sorrow and the Pity
? Lanzmann was such a sanctimonious presence—kind of like the Elie Wiesel of filmmakers. He sure as hell wasn’t the Primo Levi. You look at those two writers about Auschwitz, and the depth and humanity of Levi and the capital gains of Wiesel. He was arrogant and self-serving.”

Pauline turned in her review of
Shoah
, and Shawn called her into his office as soon as he had read it. He did not want to publish it at all, and they had a series of heated discussions over it. Shawn held the piece for two weeks, which enraged her—she felt like a schoolgirl being reprimanded for having written an honest essay. Finally she was able to get it into print, on two conditions: that it was strategically placed at the end of the column that led with her reviews of
Out of Africa
and
The Color Purple
, and that she added an opening that prepared the reader for what was to follow. It wasn’t Pauline’s style to offer an apologia for her views or to prepare her readers for a soft landing, but Shawn was immovable on this point. Grudgingly she provided the introduction:

She followed this equivocal opening with an objection to Lanzmann’s interviewing techniques: “We watch him putting pressure on people—pouncing on a detail here or there—and we register the silences, the hesitancies, the breakdowns . . . sitting in a theatre seat for a film as full of dead spaces as this one seems to me a form of self-punishment.” She went on to compare
Shoah
unfavorably with the level of moral complexity presented in
The Sorrow and the Pity
, with “so many widely differing instances of collaboration and resistance, and such a steady accumulation of perspectives.” In
Shoah
Lanzmann seemed to be stacking the deck to show an entire world of blind cruelty, and as a result, she felt there was no way into the movie. It wasn’t quite so much what the film was saying as its way of saying it that disturbed her. “It’s not just the exact procedures used in the extermination process that Lanzmann is hunting down,” she wrote. “He’s after the Gentiles’ attitudes toward the process.
Shoah
presents a world in which a Gentile rarely shows any human feeling toward a Jew. The Polish peasants who saw Jewish children being thrown into vans by their feet don’t seem to have been upset, or even touched.” She believed that Lanzmann’s principal motive in making the film “appears to be to show you that the Gentiles will do it to the Jews again if they get a chance.” It was a tough and provocative line of thinking, but toward the end of her review, she nearly tumbled off the path of her argument when she said, “The film is diffuse, but Lanzmann is blunt-minded: he’s out to indict the callous. If you were to set him loose, he could probably find anti-Semitism anywhere.” It was a stunning lapse of judgment, considering that Lanzmann was looking for anti-Semitism in the most obvious of places—the death camps. While Pauline’s intellectual honesty was admirable, it was difficult to shake off the feeling that her thinking was influenced by other factors, of which she was only partly conscious.

Lillian Ross recalled,

Shawn’s fears about Pauline’s response to the movie proved justified: Her comments proved antagonistic to the Jewish community, in New York and elsewhere. There was an immediate outcry from the respected critic Alfred Kazin, from
The New Republic
’s Leon Wieseltier, and from her by now regular adversary,
The Village Voice
, represented this time by J. Hoberman. Wieseltier went so far as to suggest that she didn’t see
Shoah
’s worth because the movie refrained from depicting the violence to which she was obviously addicted; he said she might have liked it better if it had been directed by Brian De Palma.

One of the most incensed readers was Dan Talbot, who wrote a long letter of protest to Pauline, and copied Shawn on it:

He closed his lengthy letter with a telling observation: “You’re often on target but some forces outside of film criticism prevented you from experiencing this work in a whole way.”

Shawn called Talbot and confided that, although he had never censored one of the magazine’s critics, he had seriously considered not running the review. Pauline did not respond to Talbot’s letter, and they did not speak for an entire year.

A number of Pauline’s other friends parted company with her in their views on
Shoah
. Owen Gleiberman—then a young critic at
The Boston Phoenix
, and one who liked the film very much—thought that her review was one of her greatest efforts, and that it actually showed deep respect for the profundity of the Holocaust. David Edelstein had also admired
Shoah
, and couldn’t help wondering if part of her resistance to the film had to do with her deep-rooted suspicion of any religious group. “She had so little use for doctrine, or for Torah scholarship, or any of that crap,” said Edelstein. “She was as dismissive of it as anyone I’ve ever known. Uncomprehending. But I do believe that she couldn’t have written what she wrote if she didn’t on some level believe in an oversoul, some sort of interconnectedness that I think the great artists tap into and that she tapped into when she wrote about their work. I am sure she would snort like crazy if she heard me talk about it in those terms. I believe that she was an extremely spiritual person without being in any way, shape, or form a believer. I’ve met many skeptics, and in some ways they’re extremely obnoxious in their bottom-line dismissal of the idea of transcendence. They are so wedded to this idea that any discussion of the spirit is a delusion, that they can’t even give themselves to great art in a way that Pauline would recognize. Pauline could be transported—she could go to another place without identifying it as religious.”

On the subject of
Shoah
, Pauline herself remained unrepentant. Nine years after her review appeared, she told
The New Yorker
’s Hal Espen that “a Holocaust movie should not be sacrosanct simply because of the subject. I think most of the reviewers were willing to call the director of
Shoah
a great filmmaker because he’d taken on a great subject. They used to treat Stanley Kramer as a great filmmaker, too, especially when he made the nuclear-disaster movie
On the Beach
.” Perhaps she tired of the way her thoughts on
Shoah
shadowed her, though: Nearly a decade later, when
For Keeps
, a compendium of her selected criticism, was published, the review was not included.

As the time came to vote on the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, Pauline lined up behind
Prizzi’s Honor
for Best Picture, and pushed for Jack Nicholson to win Best Actor and John Huston Best Director for
Prizzi,
and Jessica Lange (
Sweet Dreams
) and Coral Browne (
Dreamchild
) for Best Actress. That year her tastes prevailed, for the most part:
Prizzi’s Honor
did win prizes for Best Picture and for Nicholson, John Huston, and Angelica Huston, while Norma Aleandros took Best Actress for
The Official Story
. Woody Allen took the Screenplay prize for
The Purple Rose of Cairo.
Pauline was disappointed only in the Best Documentary prize, which went to
Shoah
.

 

The first half of 1986 continued to bring few films that fully engaged Pauline. She was quite taken with Paul Mazursky’s
Down and Out in Beverly Hills
, a reworking of Jean Renoir’s classic comedy
Boudu Saved from Drowning
, and she thought the movie’s view of the new money of Beverly Hills was wonderfully soft-edged and beautifully realized—the kind of generous-spirited social satire she always loved. For some years she had been an unabashed fan of Bette Midler, but she also perceived that hers was the kind of outsized talent that was going to have difficulty finding the right movie roles. In
Down and Out in Beverly Hills
, Pauline thought that Midler had “never before been this seductive on the screen. This is only the fourth picture she has starred in, and you see a softer, less funky Midler; she’s playing the role of a bored, dissatisfied housewife who has something extra—a warped charm rather like that of Teri Garr, but riper, juicier.” She found Geraldine Page giving one of the year’s most acclaimed performances in
The Trip to Bountiful
, nearly as actressy as she had back in 1961 in the screen version of
Summer and Smoke
. And she resisted joining in the chorus of praise hurled at Woody Allen’s new picture,
Hannah and Her Sisters
, about the romantic entanglements of three New York women. Pauline’s notes are especially revealing here: “Allen’s idea of movie acting is the reading of lines,” she scribbled to herself. “It doesn’t just repeat his work, it repeats itself.” In her printed review she wrote, “The movie is a little stale, and it suggests the perils of inbreeding. It might be time for Woody Allen to make a film with a whole new set of friends, or, at least, to take a long break from his sentimentalization of New York City.” Pauline often told friends that she wanted to carry a Harpo Marx seltzer bottle around with her and use it to squirt certain characters on the screen who irritated her. Writer Allen Barra remembered that she considered Sam Waterston as the smug architect in
Hannah and Her Sisters
a good candidate for squirting. “I don’t want to hurt him,” she said. “I just want to squirt him.”

Early 1986 was a frantic period: Pauline spent whatever little time was left between
New Yorker
deadlines promoting her latest collection of reviews,
State of the Art
, published by Dutton, where Billy Abrahams had moved and where she had followed him. In the introduction she cued readers to her thoughts on the changes in the movie industry during the 1980s, which she chose to signify by departing from her usual sexually tinged book title. (The original choice had been
Spitting Images
.) “It seemed time for a change; this has not been a period for anything like Grand Passions. I hope that
State of the Art
will sound ominous and sweeping and just slightly clinical.” While promoting the book
,
she told interviewers that although she admired the technological advances in cinematography and sound, she was constantly disappointed that the movies had lost the riskiness they’d developed in the previous decade—now they were simply too square for her. Ultimately,
State of the Art
didn’t sell nearly as well as many of her previous books had done: The net sales of the clothbound and paperback versions combined added up to 14,944.

 

For much of the 1980s Pauline had suffered from fairly steady bouts of heart trouble—the lining of her heart was perilously thin, and she had attacks of angina. She tried not to yield to it and to continue with her punishing schedule, but she did suffer a couple of collapses in screening rooms, and she carried nitroglycerine pills in her purse. Trent Duffy, who had worked as a production editor and indexer on several of her books, remembered the subject coming up while she was doing the promotional tour for
State of the Art
. Duffy was escorting her from one Fifth Avenue bookstore to another. It was a bitterly cold December, and Pauline insisted on taking a taxi everywhere. Duffy was surprised, since they were going only from Fifty-seventh Street to Fifty-third Street, but Pauline, who was holding a scarf over her face, told him that her doctor had asked her not to spend any time in the cold when the temperature was below thirty degrees. “This bum ticker of mine,” she muttered.