What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael (2020)
dir. Rob Garver
Rated: N/A
image: ©2020 Juno Films
The main issue I have with Rob Garver’s documentary about Pauline Kael, arguably the most influential film critic ever to write about movies, is that it’s too reverential of its subject. In Garver’s film, What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael, we do get the warts, but they’ve been airbrushed, even if only slightly. The film also tries to pack an entire lifetime into its 100 minutes, which often gives the feeling of rushing through the major events of Kael’s life.
Those few reservations aside, What She Said is a consistently entertaining and enlightening look at Kael. Every person – this writer most certainly included – wrestling with their movie obsession, as well as the movies themselves, owes her a great debt.
Film criticism was seen as an exercise in objectively judging the quality of a movie by the Bosley Crowthers and the Vincent Canbys who practiced it. Then came Pauline Kael. She rejected what she termed “saphead objectivity,” and strove to incorporate into her reviews her own personal history and emotional responses to the movies she saw. It was a bold new approach in the mid-1950s – her first published review was a reaction to Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight in 1953, after a magazine editor overheard her debating the movie with a friend in a coffee shop and asked her to write about it.
What She Said emphasizes two themes that shaped the life and work of Kael. One is the constant battle she had to fight as a woman in a male-dominated discipline – and in the 1950s and ‘60s, all disciplines were male-dominated. She spoke often, both in her reviews and in interviews, about the macho sensibility in film criticism, to which she was the sole counterpoint.
That probably informed her contrarian reputation, which she nurtured with obsessive devotion. What She Said chronicles Kael’s mischievous streak by documenting how she would wait for the critical consensus of a movie to solidify so that she could find her own distinctive – often opposing – angle on it.
The documentary also covers Kael’s success later in her career, in the 1970s, to build an empire of like-minded critics installed at publications around the country. Influential critical voices like David Edelstein and Paul Schrader – who would become a celebrated screenwriter after first working as a film critic – talk on screen about their experiences of being among the “Paulettes”, the derisive name given to her stable of acolytes.
The other overriding theme What She Said focuses on is Kael’s complete delight with the art form of the cinema. The documentary captures the utter exhilaration Kael felt for the movies, which is distilled in a quote from a taped interview she once did with a child, presumably her grandson. Talking about the silent era of movies, and why she fell in love with them, Kael remarked, “They didn’t have any message for us. They were just there for our pleasure.”
Pleasure was at the center of Kael’s movie fanaticism, and it was a quality rarely examined in film criticism before she burst onto the scene. In a prurient wink to her readers, the titles of her books – which were often collections of her reviews – were sexually suggestive. I Lost It at the Movies, Deeper Into Movies, When the Lights Go Down, and Taking It All In link the pleasure of movie watching and the pleasure of sex.
It was a new, liberated way – especially for a woman – to write and engage with readers. And the movies moved into this territory right along with her. Kael championed and, arguably, helped birth the New Hollywood movement, in which adult themes like sex and violence were treated more explicitly than ever before, with her ecstatic review of Arthur Penn’s seminal 1967 crime film Bonnie and Clyde. The film was scorned for its graphic violence by most other critics before Kael’s review celebrating Bonnie and Clyde helped the film find an audience.
What She Said does tackle, albeit in a perfunctory way, some of Kael’s darker sides. One of the interviewees is Kael’s daughter, Gina Broughton, and Broughton describes what it was like being raised by someone with such forceful opinions. She describes how critical Kael could be, but the movie doesn’t dig too much deeper beyond that one statement.
Kael’s influential writing didn’t only sway audiences, but also had the clout to affect the filmmakers themselves. The documentary covers an incident with the director David Lean that had a lasting impact. In what was ostensibly a gala to honor Lean’s body of work, Kael and other critics tore one of his films, Ryan’s Daughter, to pieces right in front of him. The episode is recounted in Kevin Brownlow’s biography of Lean. Both Brownlow and Lean lay the blame for the fourteen-year gap between Ryan’s Daughter and Lean’s next – and what would be his last – film, A Passage to India, at Kael and company’s feet.
Still, it’s heartbreaking to hear numerous interviewees, Kael’s own daughter among them, describe how hard it was for the critic to actually make a living doing the work she felt so passionate about. The publication where Kael spent most of her career, The New Yorker, split Kael’s time with another film critic, so that they had alternating six-months-on/six-months-off schedules.
Several people mention that Kael was never really paid a living wage, forcing her to scrape together an income from speaking engagements and even a short-lived flirtation with Hollywood production.
These and myriad other details in the life of Pauline Kael fly by at a quick pace in Garver’s documentary. The most novel thing about What She Said is the way he incorporates the dozens and dozens of film clips that relate to Kael’s story. Garver’s movie is frustrating at times due to the volume of information he tries to pack into it. But, it’s required viewing for any cinephile who has an appreciation for the way the best critics can translate the pleasures of the screen into words.
Why it got 3.5 stars:
- There’s nothing groundbreaking here, but the doc is informative and entertaining. The way Garver weaves the film clips into it is masterfully done.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- I knew I was in a little bit of trouble when I wondered to myself after the first ten minutes or so if What She Said would ever get out of trailer mode. It was just a lot of quick cutting with a heavy use of music. It does eventually settle down, but I think Garver was attempting to build an excitement, like Kael did in many of her reviews, but it didn’t come off in quite the same way.
- The movie covers (again, briefly) how Kael turned to criticism after failing at becoming an artist herself. We’ve all been there, Pauline, we’ve all been there…
- I wrote in my notes, “We’re all Pauline Kael now - writing style.” She really did change the way people write about movies, and we’ve all adopted her style. I wonder what she would think of the legions of critics posting their stuff online.
- I mentioned in the review that several people said Kael never made a living wage from film criticism. I’m probably being petty, but that’s better than the no wage that 99% of us make at it now.
- Best Pauline Kael quote of the movie: When asked why she feels qualified to critique movies even though she’s never made one: “You don’t have to lay an egg to know if it tastes good.” HA!
- There is one dreadful creative choice in the movie. Garver gets several voice actors (the director even supplies the voice of Woody Allen himself) to read letters that celebrities wrote to Kael over the years. These celebrity impressions are absolutely cringe-inducing.
- I said there was nothing groundbreaking in What She Said, but watching it did make me confront my own values, abilities, style, voice, and stance when it comes to film criticism. I appreciated that the film made me do that. If you want to hear about those revelations, pay me!
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Week ten. I rented What She Said through a virtual screening room collaboration between the makers of the film and my favorite local, indie movie theater, The Texas Theater. I was happy to support both entities with my purchase. Can I just say, I hope movie theaters aren’t a thing of the past. I’ve been thinking more and more about that in the past few weeks. It would break my heart.