Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [161]
Julia paid a highly romanticized tribute to female friendship—Pauline called it “classical humanist” filmmaking—and as such it was hailed as an important picture, particularly coming after so many years that had witnessed such a paucity of good opportunities for leading actresses. The very small company of bankable female stars included Fonda, Barbra Streisand, and Goldie Hawn. The press, therefore, was eager to suggest that Julia was at the fountainhead of 1977 pictures ushering in a new Era of the Woman. In a New York Times interview, Fonda felt the need to point out that the relationship between Lillian and Julia in the film was “not neurotic or sexually aberrant.” She also held forth on the importance of pictures such as Julia. “Women in movies have always been defined in terms of men, or they are victims.... It is very important to make movies about women who grow and become ideological human beings and totally committed people. We have to begin to put that image into the mass culture.”
The media jumped on Julia in just the way Fonda and the film’s producers had hoped. The picture was the focal point of a big Newsweek article called “Hollywood’s New Heroines,” about the upcoming spate of pictures for women—including Herbert Ross’s The Turning Point, Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman, and Richard Brooks’s Looking for Mr. Goodbar, based on Judith Rossner’s bestselling novel, a fictionalized account of a sexually promiscuous New York City schoolteacher who was murdered by a man she picked up in a singles bar. Pauline had admired the book’s “pulpy morbidity” and “erotic, modern-Gothic compulsiveness” but felt that Brooks had undermined a good opportunity by turning the film into a “windy jeremiad” about the dangers of a sexually liberated society, a pompous, moralizing drama that was essentially “an illustrated lecture on how nice girls go wrong.” Pauline could not understand this point of view: She didn’t see what was wrong with single women cruising bars, writing, “It’s what nice people do when they’re not feeling so nice, or when they can’t stand the complications of relationships.” And while she had previously admired Diane Keaton’s casual, affect-less acting style in Woody Allen’s comedies, she felt that in Goodbar the star had lacked “a powerful enough personality to bull her way through the huffing and puffing of Richard Brooks.” Pauline found it difficult to rejoice in the success of Julia and Looking for Mr. Goodbar simply because they provided substantial roles for actresses. She didn’t see how “women’s films” could possibly help women unless they were good films.
She was delighted, however, by Steven Spielberg’s new film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, about a random group of people whose lives are changed forever by a vision from outer space. Close Encounters was the latest step in Spielberg’s appeal to the mass comic-book imagination, and Pauline thought he had delivered a wonderful picture suffused with “a child’s playfulness and love of surprises . . . You can feel the pleasure the young director took in making it.” She thought the sequence in which the extraterrestrials’ spaceship hovers over a Wyoming mountaintop as the awestruck earthlings look on was “one of the peerless moments in movie history—spiritually reassuring, magical, and funny at the same time.” Spielberg may not have had “the feelings for words which he has for images,” but he was worth another of her superlatives: He was “probably the most gifted American director who’s dedicated to sheer entertainment.” The pleasure