Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [143]
At year’s end she saw another movie that enabled her to dig into a film the way she liked to do—Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. Pauline’s suggestion to Robert Getchell that it would be perfect for Robert Altman hadn’t come to fruition, although the finished film, with its evocative portrayal of the world of dive bars baking in the Arizona sunshine, had an Altman feel. Ellen Burstyn, who had been cast in the lead, had seen Mean Streets and eventually decided that Martin Scorsese would be able to bring to the story the grit she felt it needed.
Alice was a movie that the critics were bound to embrace; dozens of reviews mentioned that the movie had come along at just the right point, given the paucity of good women’s roles onscreen. Pauline, too, liked Alice very much, and what she came up with for The New Yorker was one of her most complex—and baffling—reviews of the ’70s.
She wrote that it was “one of the rare films that genuinely deserve to be called controversial . . . Alice is thoroughly enjoyable: funny, absorbing, intelligent even when you don’t believe in what’s going on—when the issues it raises get all fouled up.”
She referred to Alice as “the first angry-young-woman movie”—as portrayed by Ellen Burstyn, Alice had a sharp edge, and her temper was quick to rise to the surface. But she liked the way Scorsese handled the scenes with Alice and her fresh-mouthed son (Alfred Sutter), as well as his avoidance of phony Hollywood warmth. Pauline’s difficulty in getting her mind around Alice was most likely due to her uneasiness with what she took to be the movie’s feminist agenda. And in taking this position, she jumped to conclusions about Burstyn’s performance for which she could not possibly have had the least foundation:
Burstyn appears to be so determined not to play a teasing, fake-tender woman that she flings women’s-movement into her work before she’s absorbed it as an actress and discovered what she can use and what she can’t. And so instead of seeing Alice we’re seeing the collision of Alice with Ellen Burstyn’s consciousness as of this moment in history. I think we’d connect more fully with Alice if Burstyn weren’t trying to turn the role into a statement. On the other hand, there’s a stimulation and excitement in what Burstyn is attempting. I don’t really like most of her acting here—her rhythm seems a beat off—yet I’m held by what she’s trying to do, and by her need to play against stereotypes. Without her ferocious attack, Alice might seem no more than a slight, charming comedy.
By writing “The trouble with Ellen Burstyn’s performance is that she’s playing against something instead of playing a character,” Pauline was speculating on the private thought processes of the actress—something she could have had no idea about. She accused Burstyn of striking “so many of those discordant notes that she must think it’s a sign of liberation for Alice to be defiantly short-tempered.” It was crystal-ball gazing, pure and simple—and quite out of critical bounds.
Despite the fact that her review of Alice was essentially a positive one, her comments about Ellen Burstyn wounded the actress. Only four years earlier Burstyn had written Pauline a warm thank-you letter for a positive review of her performance in Paul Mazursky’s Alex in Wonderland. After the Alice review appeared, however, Pauline was not a topic Burstyn was fond of discussing.
Later in February Pauline wrote a review that would, indirectly, come to have enormous impact on her career. Hal Ashby’s Shampoo was one of the