Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [153]
It must have been difficult for Pauline to write about the film, given her history with Schrader, and in the review she pointedly did not go into any detail about Schrader’s contribution; she simply mentioned that he wrote the script. All the credit was given to Martin Scorsese, whom she thought “may just naturally be an Expressionist . . . Scorsese’s Expressionism isn’t anything like the exaggerated sets of the German directors; he uses documentary locations, but he pushes discordant elements to their limits, and the cinematographer, Michael Chapman, gives the street life a seamy, rich pulpiness.” Although she initially told Schrader that De Niro wouldn’t be up to playing Travis, she thought that he had given a wondrous performance: He had “used his own emptiness—he’s reached down into his own anomie. Only Brando has done this kind of plunging, and De Niro’s performance had something of the undistanced intensity that Brando’s had in Last Tango.” She wrote, “No other film has ever dramatized urban indifference so powerfully; at first, here, it’s horrifyingly funny, and then just horrifying.”
Ultimately, Pauline saw Taxi Driver as a brilliant expression of her own fears about New York. In the screening room where she first viewed the film—Bernard Herrmann’s score had not yet been added—she sat in stunned silence at the ending, in which Travis winds up being acclaimed as a hero and resumes his restless night-driving search, which will surely explode in violence once again. Her friend Joseph Hurley recalled that when the movie was over, she leaned back in her seat and cried, “He’s still out there!”
In the spring of 1976 Pauline’s fifth collection appeared, covering the period of her New Yorker reviews from September 1972 to March 1975. The working title had been the jokey All the Way with Movies, but when she had tested it on her friends and none of them liked it, she switched it to Reeling. This time she paid a price for the wildly passionate enthusiasm she expressed in her reviews.
Once again coverage of her book occupied the prestigious front page of The New York Times Book Review. Once again, it was no longer enough to hail it as an important volume of criticism; by now, Pauline occupied such a significant place in the literary as well as popular culture that some deeper perspective was needed. The illustration the Times chose was a constellation of star shapes filled with the head shots of various artists, including Robert Altman, Barbra Streisand, Marlon Brando, and Martin Scorsese. Pauline’s face dominated—the biggest star of all.
The assigned reviewer was Robert Brustein, the erudite theater critic. His essay opened on a positive note with a generous mention of Pauline’s “animation and charm as a movie reviewer.” Brustein felt that “at a time when many critics are expressing feelings of dejection, even a sense of apocalypse about their subjects, Miss Kael continues to write about movies with the breathless delirium of one smitten with young love.”
Brustein expressed his concern, however, that she had become too much of a clucking mother hen concerning the fates of the movies and directors she loved, and that her writing was “becoming larded with hyperbole.”
I don’t mean to quarrel with Miss Kael’s opinions. I enjoyed most of these movies myself.... No, what disturbs me about these quotes is the promotional quality of the language and the way her enthusiasm is just beginning to fade over into press agentry. Like most influential critics, Miss Kael must be aware that she is writing not only for the reader but for the advertising agency—movie ads now reprint her reviews sometimes in their entirety—but in her wholly laudable efforts to bring good movies to the attention of as many