What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael

A very late review of a very good documentary on possibly the finest film critic who ever snarked about movies.

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“What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael” has been sitting on my desk for some time, unwatched. It happens. A critic’s every year-end is filled with receiving tons of DVDs (and, more recently, online screeners) for films hoping to get a look for awards, top 10 lists, etc.

It’s an extraordinary privilege, and a depressing burden — the tally often exceeding a hundred movies, and no one can get to them all. That’s how it is with the studios: 11 months of the year they hate critics’ guts, or strenuously ignore us if we’re not in New York, LA or Chicago. Then it’s all kiss-kiss, please watch my movie and give it some love.

But even after the awards race is done and closed for the year, I’ll set aside a few DVDs I want to get to… “when I have time,” I lie to myself. Usually they pile up and are eventually disposed of.

I typically watch between three to five new (or new to me) films a week, writing about most of them, in between a full-time job, family, household duties and the tiny sliver of other distractions I’m allowed.

I often say my movie-watching existence is that of a shark: always moving forward.

Here’s how bad it can get: I thought “What She Said” was from the 2020 cycle. But no, after watching I look it up and realize it’s from 2019. Has this excellent documentary really been gathering dust for nearly two years (literally — I recall running a duster across it several times) inches away from the keyboard where I pounded out reviews of hundreds of other, usually lesser, movies?

Well, Pauline and I finally got together, and what a dance it was. So here I am, laboring on Labor Day.

If you don’t know who Pauline Kael was… well, how can you be a true film lover and not? She was the critic for The New Yorker from 1968 until 1991, and is certainly on the short list for most influential American critic of all time, along with Roger Ebert and Andrew Sarris.

Pauline had the most extravagant opinions about movies, and they were always very personal. I remember first reading one of her reviews during the 1980s, and was struck by this woman talking about watching a movie right after a romantic breakup, weeping after the screening because it struck her right at her most vulnerable.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, wrote about movies in a painfully intimate way like that before Pauline. Now, most of us are her imitators, whether consciously or not.

I learned a lot about her from this documentary. Some of the usual early life and other biographical stuff, though I admit I didn’t find that terribly interesting. The film focuses instead on the woman of letters, her work and her unrivaled passion for cinema.

For example, I hadn’t known that she spent much of the 1950s running a popular film club in San Francisco that brought in classics for a new generation to enjoy — always accompanied by her own notes and opinions. After years of toiling in obscurity, she was finally brought to New York to write for McCall’s, where her harsh reviews soon got her fired, and then briefly The New Republic, where she quit after seeing her lines rewritten.

What changed was her review of “Bonnie & Clyde,” which had been written off as violent junk before her glowing take in The New Yorker revived the film’s fortunes, and her own. It had been a terribly dull time for American movies, and here was one that finally discovered the rebellious energy happening in France, Japan, Italy, etc. She was brought in as staff critic, though curiously splitting the year with another writer — six months on, six months off.

I was astonished to learn she never made a living wage from one of the country’s tentpole publications. (She did not even join The New Yorker until she was nearly 50.) Though this forced her to spread her activities and influence through television and radio appearances, lectures and so on, all of which helped her become a cultural icon.

(I’ll admit I grew incredibly depressed upon learning this. If Pauline effing Kael couldn’t carve a full-time gig out of writing movie reviews, what hope do the rest of us have?)

She even briefly left criticism in the late 1970s to try her hand in Hollywood as a screenwriter and consultant; she enjoyed the wages but was wise enough to quickly return to her publishing home.

The documentary interviews dozens of interesting and/or influential people, from other critics to her friends and family, filmmakers, producers, authors and so on. Quentin Tarantino, David O. Russell, Molly Haskell, Alec Baldwin and many others. Her daughter comments that her mother was immune to any sense of her own influence, and this lack of self-awareness (her words) is what allowed her to be utterly fearless as a critic.

And Pauline was that. She was not a weather vane critic; she was the wind. She panned universally regarded classics like “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Shoah,” while championing middling or divisive fare like “Last Tango in Paris” and “Casualties of War” as masterpieces.

I remember buying Pauline’s huge collection of reviews, “For Keeps,” published not long after her retirement. Her writing is just so amazing, even when you hated what she was saying. Never has a book been thrown across a room more than my copy.

But always, I picked it up again and kept reading. She was that good.

Pauline’s reviews always got past the rote stuff of giving a rundown of the plot and giving an up-or-down judgement to truly understanding what a movie was trying to do, how it failed or achieved that, and where its place was as a both a product of and influencer of the culture from which it emerged.

She was not without faults. Pauline was so good at trashing movies everyone else liked that she seemed to take sadistic delight in it. Cruelty was not an unfamiliar ingredient in her writing. The film mentions a luncheon the New York critics gave around 1980 for David Lean, which he thought was a friendly social occasion and turned into a two-hour harangue about his filmmaking from Pauline that was so searing, afterward the great director questioned his commitment to his craft.

Pauline was also quite proactive in cultivating young critics, getting people exposure and pushing editors to hire her “Paulettes,” as they came to be known. I had known this, as her rivalry with Andrew Sarris at The Village Voice was famous, each fostering their own circles that did combat in the pages of their publications. But the extent to which she would actually reach out to her (as she saw them) minions, demanding they help her champion this or that film, came as something of a shock.

Paul Schrader, the storied filmmaker, got his start as a Paulette critic, and notes — apparently from experience — that if you disagreed with her too often, her patronage and friendship would soon end.

The film also spends a great deal of time exploring how Pauline had to constantly swim upriver as a woman in a gentleman’s profession, and how rebellious an act it was for a woman in the 1950s or ‘60s to not only disagree with a man, but actually make a better argument than him. The patriarchy accepted female artists for their creativity, she says, but resisted woman critics for their analytical thinking.

As with the movies, she just had a magical way of cutting through the pretense and the sophistry and getting right at what was really going on. Pauline Kael saw the truth, or at least the truth as she beheld it, and never wavered one inch in shouting it out to the world.

The film is from director/producer/editor Rob Garver, and I am astonished to learn it was his first, and still only, production credit. So I will take a feather from Pauline’s cap in her love of promoting youngsters and newbies who show promise: give this man another to make.