Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [144]
Pauline, in synch with her colleagues, felt that Shampoo “might have been no more than a saucy romp . . . But the way it has been done, the joke expands the more you think about it. Shampoo is light and impudent, yet like the comedies that live on, it’s a bigger picture in retrospect.” What she loved most about it, perhaps, was its honest, dead-on portrayal of how people in a privileged society such as Beverly Hills viewed sex, and its perception of the L.A. experience that no other movie had ever quite captured: It expressed “the emotional climate of the time and place. Los Angeles has become what it is because of the bright heat, which turns people into narcissists and sensuous provocateurs. The atmosphere seems to infantilize sex: sexual desire is despir-itualized; it becomes a demand for immediate gratification.”
For Warren Beatty, Shampoo represented a personal triumph. Since McCabe & Mrs. Miller, he had worked fairly steadily in a string of disappointing pictures, but nothing he had done since Bonnie and Clyde had had much impact. Pauline found his performance as George in Shampoo genuinely impressive; she knew that George wasn’t “an easy role; I don’t know anyone else who could have played it.” In the review she included a line that sounded a bit close to the kind of review that seemed designed to be easily excerpted in movie advertising: She called Shampoo “the most virtuoso example of sophisticated kaleidoscopic farce that American moviemakers have ever come up with.” It was an early sign of the “absolutist” streak in her reviewing, a tendency that had been fairly latent up until recent years. From this point on, however, she would often describe films and performances in terms of extremes—the best or the worst examples in history.
Directly on the heels of Shampoo she undertook what was the boldest move of her career to date. Robert Altman’s new picture, Nashville, had begun filming in the summer of 1974, and it was the director’s most ambitious project yet—an attempt to catch the spirit and pulse of mid-’70s America by way of a story set in the country music capital. Although the tone of Nashville was intimate, the film unfolded on a broad canvas: There were twenty-four principal characters in all, several of them played by major stars. Among them were the stud country singer Tom Frank (Keith Carradine), Opal (Geraldine Chaplin), a sycophantic groupie posing as a BBC reporter, the strung-out country star Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley), the adulterous gospel singer Linnea (Lily Tomlin), and third-party presidential candidate Hal Phillip Walker (Thomas Hal Phillips).
Pauline made a brief visit to the set of Nashville to tape an interview with Altman to be broadcast on European television. As she had when she showed up for the filming of Thieves Like Us, she saw enough to give her a good idea of what the director was after—and of course, his choice of a pop-culture subject like Nashville was already to her liking. “She was very entertaining and interesting and funny about herself—self-deprecating,” Michael Murphy, who was in the cast, remembered. “Bob was one of the guys who, if you crossed him, he’d let you know about it. He yelled at her a couple of times, and she’d say, ‘Oh, Bob . . .’ And then she would come back with a good review or a not-so-good review, and they’d be friends again. He didn’t court her in the same way a lot of people would. He courted her, but he was himself, and he wasn’t paying homage, really. He was very happy that she understood him and what he was trying to do.”
Murphy also sensed something else beneath