Pauline Kael

There have been critics in all media that have dominated their field. They’ve gained trust and admiration and they’ve led legions of readers to experience the art that they loved. But few were as influential as Pauline Kael, who was as deeply loved and vehemently reviled as anybody in the cinematic community. Loved for her championing of good movies that she felt needed more attention, hated for viciously panning movies that many loved like Sound of Music and American Beauty. Yet her fame wasn’t a result of her opinions alone, rather her entertaining and exuberant style of writing. In many ways, Kael was at the forefront of sensationalist reviewing.
No matter what the review, Kael wrote in extremes. If she didn’t like a movie she let people know, often taking it particularly hard on actors, even as far as to mock their physical features (making particular note of Tom Cruise’s height, and deeming Lily Tomlin a ‘wistful pony’). Yet when she loved a movie, she put her heart into it, she wanted other people to feel what she felt, the lightheartedness of Last Tango in Paris, the heartache and triumph of My Left Foot. Though when she didn’t really pan or rave about a movie, there was still a spark in her writing because she would criticize other things related to the movie. She didn’t mind Hiroshima, Mon Amour, the little she said about it in her article was not bad, instead she constructed the main thesis of her article on a critique of the “liberal intellectuals” that were raving about this movie only because, “[They] find wish fulfillment in the form of cheap and easy congratulation on their sensitivities and their liberalism.” She would outright thumb her nose at the very type of person she was working for at the New Yorker. And whether or not it was a result of the taught relationship with the editor that everybody has, it’s still a joy to read.
Not to say that her career didn’t have a downward slope. She said that the movies had lost touch with the mass audience that she had so long revered, and who’s culture she had reveled in for the extent of her career. She felt that films were no longer uplifting movies like Goodfellas and American Beauty made the mass audience feel bad about us as a culture and she felt that wasn’t what the people wanted. So, she got tired of writing pans, (and if you right pans like hers about movies that were generally liked including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, you’d be exhauseted too) and on a whim decided to quit The New Yorker. Still called all sorts of names after her death, from brilliant to unaware of the art form she was supposed to be an authority on, it is maintained by some that her grammar and choice of words were to excite us and connect us to the movie, and when it comes down to it, that’s what criticism should be about.