Oscar Nominees Interview: and Why I Miss Pauline Kael

(REVISED on Feb 10--to correct errors brought on in part by an exhausting day....)

In the weeks ahead, I will offer an occasional opinion, essay, rant, etc., about this year's Oscar nominations.  Tonight, I want to share how an innocent round-table discussion among actors made me yearn for the writing of one of the best film critics this country ever produced.

The latest Newsweek (February 8) featured an interview and  discussion with six of this year's Academy Award Acting Nominees: Morgan Freedman, Sandra Bullock, Jeff Bridges, Woody Harrelson, Gabourey Sidibe, and Carey Mulligan.

It was a lighthearted and entertaining discussion, designed to personalize these performers and give Oscar-watchers a good feeling should any of them eventually take home the gold. 

Among other tidbits, we learned that Sandra Bullock is the daughter of opera singers/voice teachers; that Jeff Bridges is a proponent of motion-capture filmmaking (used in his upcoming film, a remake of Disney's "Tron"); that Woody Harrelson got his start by doing Elvis imitations; that Morgan Freeman is often mistaken for Samuel L Jackson, and calls "Avatar"  "a bit faddish...really cartoons..."; that Gabourey Sidibe blew her audition for a Huggies commercial (as a tot) for crying too much; and that Carey Mulligan wanted to act since age six (and has flexible toes!!)

Then I read the following exchange and realized that something has been missing from the film industry, and the art of film criticism, perhaps never to be recaptured:

NEWSWEEK: Morgan, how did you feel when you were 50 years old to read the opening line of that famous Pauline Kael review of Street Smart: “Is Morgan Freeman the greatest American actor?” Do you remember that?
FREEMAN: Of course I remember that.

NEWSWEEK: Gabby and Carey, do you know who Pauline Kael is?

[They both shake their head no.]

Even though I understand that these young performers are of a new era, I can't help but wish that somewhere in their education, on their way to working in the industry, they had some familiarity, some understanding, of one of the voices that influenced their profession. 

Critics of the arts define their eras. Pauline Kael defined a period in which I came of age, learning about the art of movies and filmmaking.  Kael was the primary film critic for The New Yorker from 1968 to 1991.  She was smart, idiosyncratic, and brought with her great knowledge of literature and music and theater, elevating the art of film by connecting it to universally accepted and venerable art forms. At the same time, she wrote as a fan, her intelligence shaping her style.  Her love for movies of all kinds, and her sharp eye and wit, always were convincing, even if a reader did not always agree.

I admire her story.  The daughter of Polish immigrants, her family moved to San Francisco when they lost their family farm.  She did a number of jobs (including that of seamstress). By her mid-thirties, she was writing film reviews for City Lights magazine, and running the Berkely Cinema Guild, programming movies for a 2-screen art house (similar to our own Music Box Theater, Chicago's answer to the Castro in San Francisco).  Her capsule reviews, written in a personal style and cutting verbage, were considered collectors items even then.

She approached movies head-on, proclaiming an unabashed love for writing and acting, and a distaste for pretension.  She disparaged moguls, businessmen, and pseudo-artists alike.  She appealed to the childlike wonder of educated filmgoers who were insecure about their love of movies as an art form.  It became acceptable, under a steady diet of Kael, to connect with a movie, to feel as though you could change your life after a work of emotional and cinematic power, but you didn't have to know a lot about "film grammar" to have the experience.


One of my favorite quotes, which sums up her critical philosophy, and one that I think is vanishing from the art of film criticism, is: "The critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.”

In 1967, after writing for numerous and high-profile publications, she was hired as the film critic of The New Yorker, and her inaugural review, an in-depth and impassioned rave of "Bonnie and Clyde", vaulted her to national recognition.  That was the beginning of the American Film Generation, the American New Wave.  She admitted that her writing was best at this time because the movies offered so much.  She raved about pictures that became some of my favorites: Cabaret, The Godfather, Nashville. She also went on flights of fancy, and went apart from the crowd. She was true to her views, and while I often violently disagreed with her, I always came away from her reviews feeling as though I had just had the experience--or had the renewed experience--of seeing the movie about which she had written.

That, in the best sense of the word, is a re-view.

She created a new aesthetic: the movie review as an art form in itself, that entertained and informed readers independently of their knowledge of the film under scrutiny, but which added a deeper appreciation  of all of the movies she discussed.

Many critics and filmmakers cite Kael as an influence in their own creative work: Roger Ebert, Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson, A.O. Scott, Elvis Mitchell, Michael Sragow...many other critics, often referred to as "Paulettes" due to their "homages" and imitation of her style.

And myself..she influenced me and my way of "reading" and appreciating a film, and my way of trying to capture the experience in my writing of them.

I have read all of her books, many of the titles deliberately sexually suggestive (movies were a sensual experience to her, always).  Titles like "I Lost it at the Movies", "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang", "Deeper Into Movies", "When the Lights Go Down"...I have read them all, many times until some of them have lost their covers....

She won a national Book award for "Deeper into Movies", the first time a book of film criticism ever won such a prestigious literary award.

I wonder what she would have liked today.... I think she would have loved "Avatar" and "A Single Man" both.


She died on September 4, 2001.

“Trash has given us an appetite for art”. Another characteristic quote...she believed that movies rarely achieved the status of art, and so to love movies at all, we need to find an appreciation for trash.  I go back and forth on this one....

Tempestuous, opinionated, informed, funny, able to recapture a film and do it justice, good or bad....Champion of artists and craftsmen, writers (especially!) and performers that really did have a sincere desire to change the landscape of cinema while entertaining us and making us think (like Altman, Scorsese, Bertolucci, DeSica,  Mankiewicz)......Essayist of an incomparable personal style, who missed nothing, who was unashamed of her own guilty pleasures, who cast herself in each review in the role of the consummate film-lover, who didn't care a bit if you agreed or disagreed but wanted to share her enthusiasm with you all the same.....

I miss her. 

"August" in February--In Praise of Estelle Parsons

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We finally saw the highly-anticipated "August: Osage County" last night at the Cadillac Palace Theater in Chicago.  Tracy Letts' play was a phenomenon: from its beginnings at Chicago's Steppenwolf theater, to a smashing run on Broadway, five Tony Awards, and a Pulitzer Prize, the show is here for a two-week run, back in its home town. To say that this is an emotionally-charged and complex domestic comedy-drama is an understatement. It's the most stirring and troubling portrait of a deluded family since "Whos's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?".

The premise of the play concerns the disappearance of the patriarch of an Oklahoma family, and the remaining family members' confrontation of long-buried truths. At the center of the maelstrom  is Violet, the wife of the missing man, and mother of three daughters who come home to deal with the crisis, bringing with them their own failures and foibles, only to be exposed raw . Violet suffers from mouth cancer, is addicted to a host of different painkillers, and has lost her ability to preserve the  fragile, arbitrary bonds of  her family.  During the course of the play, she toys with the audiences' sympathies as she presides over the vicious destruction of her daughters' lives.

But, I asked Mark this morning...what is the play ABOUT?

That is where "August: Osage County" rises above the average drama, with its tightly woven themes and well-paced emotional arc. After thinking about it all day, I write this in appreciation of a wonderful piece of playwriting that has given me a renewed energy and inspiration to move forward with my own play:

It's about caring for aging and difficult parents as well as raising children in a world lacking in kindness and self-restraint.  It's about the rage and guilt experienced by the caretakers of loved ones with alcoholism and drug addiction.  It's about how we build layers of self-deception to protect ourselves from painful truths, and how easily these layers can be stripped away.  It's about life's choices, and regret, and the struggle to keep up the appearance of happiness.  It's about greed, anger, the unfairness of love, and the way marriages are saved or destroyed without logic. It's about the absurdity, even hilarity, of the relationships between people that just  happen to be related to one another.  It's about our ignorance of those who work behind the scenes to help us live better, even as we insist on destroying our lives. It's about poets, and writers, and confessions and expressions of love.  It asks if some truths are best kept hidden, and whether we can save each other from our bad choices with the right action at the right time. 

It's about America, in particular the severe outlook of those who live in the "plains", and how we have lost our ability to appreciate our natural circumstances.  The Native American woman  hired to cook and keep house is plain-spoken and clear-eyed, knows what she wants, and is content with what she has.  Her presence in the play raises it to a level of a metaphor that hovers over the play from her attic bedroom in the intricate 3-story set Letts required. 

Just like the Weston family, the country is seen as having lost its promise. Violet retreats finally to the attic, desolate and desperate, for comfort, which their housekeeper provides, in a tableau reminiscent of the extraordinary "pieta" of "Cries and Whispers".  It is sad, but not devoid of hope.

I write this in appreciation of well-developed, original characters, written with humor and honesty. I was surprised at the number of laughs the play elicited, especially during the centerpiece dinner scene, which takes the audience from farce to rage.  At the end of Act Two, I was wound up with a mixture of anger and relief at suspense that had just been barely relieved.  

Most of all, I write this in appreciation of the talents of 82-year-old Estelle Parsons in the lead role of Violet Weston.  I admired her from the first time I witnessed her primal performance as Blanche Barrow in "Bonnie and Clyde" (Best Supporting Actress Oscar, 1967). 

Her explosive and heartbreaking work in this play was like a personal act of love from her to the audience.

Parsons was reluctant to take on the role; as a New Englander, she thought the raw honesty of these characters was too foreign to her.  Yet she agreed, and later joked that she found her inner "viciousness" necessary to embody the character.  Parsons always had a sly presence on the screen, a barely disguised humor in her acting.  Here, on stage,she is so given over to the role, its physical depictions of additcion, her wild swings from raucous humor to pathos, it is impossible to see her as having played anything else.  Her energy and emotional investment exhausted her....she could barely smile during the curtain call.  I want to thank the whole cast and crew, and Tracy Letts, and especially Parsons for giving us a carefully constructed masterpiece mounted with great care by all involved.

This was a defining moment in my newly expanding foray into serious theater.

Postscript: Apparently Tracy Letts has completed a version of the screenplay for the film now being produced by the Weinstein Company.  Casting has not yet begun, but there is a frenzy of agents and performers jockeying for parts.  If the movie keeps its focus tightly on the characters within the setting of the house, without "opening up", it could be a powerful classic.