The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael

"She became a film critic quite late in life, when she was in her 40s. She had studied philosophy at Berkeley, but it took her a long time to establish herself. She eventually ended up at the New Yorker magazine where she created quite a stir because of her impatience with the stuffiness of film criticism at the time. She rejected the way most critics approached films by over-theorizing, without regard to what the movies made them feel. She also disliked their general disdain for pop movies and their elitism. She hated clubbiness of any sort. Kael brought to her reviews a combination of the visceral and the intellectual that I found absolutely delicious. When the New Yorker came out, I used to rush out and buy it – for me, reading her was like eating a scrumptious meal. She very quickly gathered both extreme advocates and those that found her to be impossibly idiosyncratic and her tone way too colloquial. Exactly. She was not afraid to employ rough colloquialisms. Kael understood, rightly, that they lent vitality and reality to writing. And she was conversational, often to the chagrin of the grammar-checkers at the magazine. There would be interruptions and interjections; it was like talking – but extremely intelligent talking. Her reviews were full of unexpected insights. She certainly had her favourite directors, but you could never predict exactly what she was going to say. As I was looking over her work again in preparation for this interview, it really struck to me, for example, how in one review she could say things that might drive a feminist crazy and then in another review be full of feminist insight way ahead of her time. She was non-ideological and non-dogmatic; there was something so fresh and engaging about her. She was a real individual. She is still delicious to read, even though the movies aren’t currently playing. But whether or not she is still widely read, the fact is that she cracked open cultural criticism for the rest of us, making it possible to write seriously about Jaws and The Godfather and not just Ingmar Bergman. She made the use of a colloquial, more energetic critical voice possible. She also clearly loved sex in the movies, and talked about it frequently and vividly. In a then quite reserved magazine like the New Yorker , that was truly taboo-breaking. She showed you could be smart and still talk like a regular person. There was something so incredibly refreshing about that. I don’t think we have anyone today who is a great film reviewer. What we have today are collective sites like Rotten Tomatoes, where viewers count stars, we have a lot of pedestrian reviewers, and then we have some Pauline Kael clones. But to be a Kael clone is precisely not to be like Kael, because she was so committed to being who she was and no-one else. So, while there are elements of her style and approach that have become conventionalised within film criticism, for that very reason they are no longer exciting and fresh — which her work always was. I think the people writing for the New Yorker now are very intelligent and they do try for what Kael had, but mostly, for me, it falls flat."