Review: What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael

Film critic Pauline Kael was a force to be reckoned with and utterly fearless

Pauline Kael was revered by some, feared by others. The film critic who wrote for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New Republic, and McCall's to name a few, was fearless in writing what she thought of what she saw on the big screen and didn't care what others thought.

The documentary What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael attempts to give a full a picture as possible of the woman and how she became one of the most revered movie critics in the western world. A lot of people appear in the movie, some her disciples called "Paulettes", some directors, producers and thousands of film clips are interspersed throughout the 95-minute film.



The "what she said" part is narrated by Sarah Jessica Parker, who reads out passages from her actual reviews, words that fans loved for being so subjective and relatable.

Kael was born in 1919 and her daughter Gina says her mother grew up watching silent movies, and then talkies, then colour films. In 1948 Kael had her daughter and was a single mother, something that was practically unheard of in that period.

She fancied herself a playwright but was terrible at it; in 1953 she got her first break in film critiquing when the editor of City Lights magazine overheard Kael arguing about films with a friend in a coffeeshop and asked her to review Charlie Chaplin's Limelight. She obliged and panned it, calling it "Slimelight".

She completely panned The Sound of Music

Writing didn't pay the bills and she also took a job as the Berkeley Cinema Guild manager from 1955-60, curating which movies to show and writing the mini reviews of them that people loved so much that they kept them on their fridges.

Her strong opinions got her attention that led to a job or got her fired from a job.

After publishing a collection of her reviews in 1965 called I Lost It at the Movies that became an unexpected bestseller, Kael got a job with McCall's, a women's magazine that pushed her into a mainstream audience.

When The Sound of Music came out the same year, she completely panned the film that was a box office hit, describing it as "the sugar-coated lie that people seem to want to eat". After the review came out in McCall's, the magazine got a slew of mail from readers who disagreed with Kael.

The documentary says she was fired because of this, but in Wikipedia, Kael and the magazine's editor Robert Stein denied this. He said he fired her months later, after she didn't like such blockbusters as Lawrence of Arabia, Dr Zhivago, and A Hard Day's Night.

Kael championed Bonnie & Clyde to box office success

She then wrote for The New Republic but not for long -- Kael wrote a review of Bonnie & Clyde praising it but the magazine refused to publish it so The New Yorker took it and that piece helped give the movie the attention it needed to succeed in the box office.

Kael stayed at The New Yorker from 1968 to 1991, but the film reviewing was only for six months of the year, the other half of the time they were reviewed by Penelope Gilliatt. So Kael still had to find other sources of income and even at one point took up Hollywood actor Warren Beatty's offer to help him write a screenplay but that only lasted for six months and she went back to New York.

Her scathing review of Ryan's Daughter in 1970 affected director David Lean was so much that he says in the documentary that he lost confidence in himself and couldn't make another movie for 14 years. Others complained they had thrown so much of their time and effort into their work only for her to rip it into shreds with her words.

Quentin Tarantino loved reading Kael's reviews

One director was smart enough to make sure his film was released just when Kael finished her six-month reviewing stint which made her absolutely mad, but for him this was the only way he could get an objective review.

However, the tables were turned on Kael when her collection of reviews in a book called When the Lights Go Down was published in 1980. Her fellow colleague Renata Adler at The New Yorker wrote an 8,000-word essay that dismissed Kael's work as "jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless". The review hit Kael hard, and she never wrote a piece to rebut it. 

In the early 1980s she was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and resigned from The New Yorker in 1991. She died 10 years later.

Kael found her voice in reviewing films

What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael is a staunch defender of her, how she was such a forceful personality, at times to stand up to the men, and others to say what she thought of the film.

Not being familiar with her work, I found the film to be for those who knew of her, and didn't give enough context to the controversies she courted, or perhaps attracted. Nevertheless, she was a pioneer in her field and she wasn't afraid of giving her opinion on anything. What would she think about the world of film today?

What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael
Written and directed by Rob Garver
95 minutes
Appearances by Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, Jerry Lewis, Quentin Tarantino, and Alec Baldwin