Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [150]
Pauline considered Adèle H. the first genuinely great movie to emerge from Europe since Last Tango in Paris. What she admired most was the way that Truffaut managed to tell his story in a way that was both “romantic and ironic: he understands that maybe the only way we can take great romantic love now is as craziness, and that the craziness doesn’t cancel out the romanticism—it completes it. Adèle’s love isn’t corrupted by sanity; she’s a great crazy. She carries her love to the point where it consumes everything else in her life, and when she goes mad, it doesn’t represent the disintegration of her personality; it is, rather, the final integration.”
The big American movie of 1975—the movie that captured the hearts of the public in the way that Pauline had hoped Nashville would—was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Milos Forman’s adaptation of the 1962 novel by Ken Kesey. Its story of Randle McMurphy, who leads a rebellion among the inmates of an Oregon state mental hospital, was closely tied to the political turmoil of the ’60s, with the inmates standing in for America’s free-spirited, searching youth, and the maddeningly calm and manipulative Nurse Ratched being viewed as a reflection of Nixon’s silent majority. These associations were inevitable, and because Kesey’s novel had been so popular, particularly with college students, an even reasonably faithful film version of it was probably destined to be a hit.
But One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest received mixed reviews when it opened in November, with several critics complaining that the novel had been oversimplified. Howard Kissel felt that a few years earlier, the good guys vs. bad guys scheme would have “led to a victory for the good guys. Now it is the bad guys who triumph—for no apparent reason other than to intensify the emotional blow to the audience.”
In her New Yorker review, Pauline took issue with the “long literary tradition behind this man’s-man view of women as the castrater-lobotomizers,” but she thought the film deserved credit for making Kesey’s comic-strip fantasy about freedom and repression human and more realistic. She found it “a powerful, smashingly effective movie” and praised Milos Forman for grasping “how crude the poet-paranoid system of the book would look on the screen now that the sixties’ paranoia has lost its nightmarish buoyancy.... Forman could have exploited the Watergate hangover and retained the paranoid simplicities that helped make hits of Easy Rider and Joe, but instead he . . . has taken a less romantic, more suggestive approach.” She thought that McMurphy was a great role for Jack Nicholson, with his “half smile—the calculated insult that alerts audiences to how close to the surface his hostility is.” She thought McMurphy was “so much of a Nicholson role that the actor may not seem to be getting a chance to do much new in it. But Nicholson doesn’t use the glinting, funny-malign eyes this time; he has a different look—McMurphy’s eyes are farther away, muggy, veiled even from himself. You’re not sure what’s going on behind them.”
The opening of a new Stanley Kubrick film had become an occasion for Pauline to dread. In the wake of 2001 and A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick had been all but deified by the media; the combination of his reputation as one of filmland’s true intellectuals and his attention-getting ways of making movies had many critics and reporters poised to salute his every effort as a Great Cultural Landmark. The new project was Barry Lyndon, based on Thackeray’s novel about a penniless Irish rogue who rises to dizzying wealth and social position in the mid–eighteenth century. Kubrick’s film moved at a perfect adagio tempo that was nevertheless surprisingly novel and hardly ever dull.
Pauline acknowledged the film’s visually arresting quality and found its first segments mesmerizing.