GODMOTHER OF FILM CRITICISM PAULINE KAEL: 5 of Her Greatest Reviews
Contentedly Subjective, Insightful, and Self Satisfied Takes on Classics
Pauline Kael, together with Roger Ebert, made film criticism something tangible; something you felt you could understand; something you didn’t have to parse to understand.
I heard her name many times before I bothered to look her up. Not because I didn’t think she’d be a talented, engaging writer, but because it seemed as though her peers and her targets found her uniquely harsh. Words like “brash” seemed poised to enter the conversation as soon as her name came up. I don’t know if that’s how those who referenced her meant to come off, or if it’s down to the way I interpreted their words, but so the impression was made.
The inspiration for finally delving into some of her finest crticism came from a Letterboxd account (linked below) ironically named “NotPaulineKael”. Someone is publishing her old reviews under this username on the film social media site — presumably because they are a joy to read. I don’t see what else they (the “culprit”) get out of it.
Was Kael harsh? Brash? Does she berate you with her opinions? Maybe sometimes yes, but often rightly and entertainingly so. No one wants to read a buttoned-up, “professionalized” perspective on a movie probably meant to thrill or excite you in some way other than the one who wrote it — and often not even them.
Kael knew that, and wrote like she knew it. That The New Yorker published it is something else.
Many of her reviews reference her movie-going experience in addition to the movie itself. Some of her most underrated reviews seem more an interrogation of society than an interrogation of a crappy 80s B-movie.
She defined, deconstructed, and reconstructed film criticism for the everyday movie goer.
Here are some of the best examples of her talent.
5. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
Published 1975
“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a powerful, smashingly effective movie— not a great movie but one that will probably stir audiences' emotions and join the ranks of such pop-mythology films as The Wild One, Rebel Without A Cause, and Easy Rider. Ken Kesey's novel about a gargantuan rebel-outcast, McMurphy, locked up in a hospital for the insane, was a lyric jag, and the book became a nonconformists' bible. Written in 1960 and 1961, and published early in 1962, the novel preceded the university turmoil, Vietnam, drugs, the counterculture. Yet it contained the prophetic essence of that whole period of revolutionary politics going psychedelic, and much of what it said (and it really said it; the book intentionally laid out its meaning like a comic strip) has entered the consciousness of many—possibly most—Americans.”
4. The Breakfast Club (1985)
Published 1985
“Most of The Breakfast Club takes place in the library of a suburban Chicago high school where, for various infractions of the rules, five students are serving a 7 A.M.-4 P.M. Saturday detention. Each of the five is a different type, and together they form a cross-section of the student body. They are a champion wrestler (Emilio Estevez), a popular redhead "princess" (Molly Ringwald), a grind (Anthony Michael Hall), a glowering rebel-delinquent (Judd Nelson), who wears an earring, and a shy, skittish weirdo (Ally Sheedy). They walk in not liking each other and with their defenses in place. But they're like the homosexuals who gathered at the party in The Boys In the Band and played the "truth game." In the course of the day, under the prodding of the rebel and the mellowing effect of the marijuana he provides, they peel off layers of self-protection, confess their problems with their parents, and, after much shedding of tears, are stripped down to their true selves. When the doors are opened, they walk out transformed. They know who they are; they know who the others are. The Breakfast Club is A Chorus Line without the dancing. It's The Exterminating Angel as a sitcom. This is a very wet movie (and a very white movie), but it is a box-office hit, and has been widely praised for its seriousness. "It's the kind of mature teenage film I enjoy seeing" is one of the quotes used in the advertising.”
3. Dead Poets Society (1989)
Published 1989
“In Dead Poets Society Robin Williams plays John Keating, an eager, dedicated teacher with a gift for liberating his students. Crushed, frightened prep-school boys flower in Keating's class. He talks to them about the passions expressed in poetry, and they become emboldened. The creative impulses they'd kept hidden—or didn't know they had—are released.”
2. The Godfather Part II (1974)
Published 1974
“At the close of The Godfather, Michael Corleone has consolidated his power by a series of murders and has earned the crown his dead father, Don Vito, handed him. In the last shot, Michael — his eyes clouded — assures his wife, Kay, that he is not responsible for the murder of his sister’s husband. The door closes Kay out while he receives the homage of subordinates, and if she doesn’t know that he lied, it can only be because she doesn’t want to. The Godfather, Part II begins where the first film ended: before the titles there is a view behind that door. The new king stands in the dark, his face lusterless and dispassionate as his hand is being kissed. The familiar Godfather waltz theme is heard in an ambiguous, melancholy tone. Is it our imagination, or is Michael’s face starting to rot? The dramatic charge of that moment is Shakespearean. The waltz is faintly, chillingly ominous.”
1. Bonnie & Clyde (1967)
Published 1967
“How do you make a good movie in this country without being jumped on? Bonnie and Clyde is the most excitingly American American movie since The Manchurian Candidate. The audience is alive to it. Our experience as we watch it has some connection with the way we reacted to movies in childhood: with how we came to love them and to feel they were ours—not an art that we learned over the years to appreciate but simply and immediately ours. When an American movie is contemporary in feeling, like this one, it makes a different kind of contact with an American audience from the kind that is made by European films, however contemporary. Yet any movie that is contemporary in feeling is likely to go further than other movies—go too far for some tastes—and Bonnie and Clyde divides audiences, as The Manchurian Candidate did, and it is being jumped on almost as hard. Though we may dismiss the attacks with “What good movie doesn’t give some offense?,” the fact that it is generally only good movies that provoke attacks by many people suggests that the innocuousness of most of our movies is accepted with such complacence that when an American movie reaches people, when it makes them react, some of them think there must be something the matter with it—perhaps a law should be passed against it. Bonnie and Clyde brings into the almost frighteningly public world of movies things that people have been feeling and saying and writing about. And once something is said or done on the screens of the world, once it has entered mass art, it can never again belong to a minority, never again be the private possession of an educated, or “knowing,” group. But even for that group there is an excitement in hearing its own private thoughts expressed out loud and in seeing something of its own sensibility become part of our common culture.”
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Now go watch some movies or follow a local critic.