Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [165]
Around this time, her judgment began to seem as if it had gotten knocked slightly askew, leading her to praise films that struck many readers as being something less than she claimed. She appeared at times to be reviewing the sensibility behind the film rather than the end result. “She at that point in her movie criticism was becoming a kineticist,” observed Richard Albarino. “She loved the kinetics of movies. She was a sensualist. That kinetic style of film-making bowled her over—movies that were exciting in that way, with real feeling behind them.” She seemed to feel that if she concentrated hard enough, she could transform her reader’s opinions.
Toward the end of her 1977–78 New Yorker stint, she reviewed two films that appealed to that sense. One was James Toback’s latest, Fingers, a drama about the bizarre duality that marks the life of Jimmy Fingers, a debt collector who dreams of becoming a concert pianist. While other reviewers gave the unruly film mostly negative notices, Pauline raved about it. She loved the idea that “Jimmy needs to be an exciting, violent, emotional man, a man who’s at war with himself, who has so much going on that he’s shooting sparks, hitting highs and lows.” Even if much of the film seemed “still locked up in the writer-director’s head,” she loved it because he showed every sign of having “true moviemaking fever.” In describing one of her favorite scenes—one in which the prizefighter Dreems (played by Toback’s close friend Jim Brown) knocks two girls’ heads together—she abandoned all restraint: “The shock is in the speed of Dreems’s action: the film views him not as thinking fast but as not needing to think—as not being sicklied o’er with the white man’s pale cast of thought.” George Malko remembered vividly the impact it had on her in the theater: “The only time I ever felt Pauline levitate in the seat next to me was when Jim Brown takes the two young girls and cracks their heads together. Pauline gasped, ‘Oooh!’ and literally left her seat.”
In her review of Fingers, Pauline had written, “Normality doesn’t interest Toback. He’s playing the literary adolescent’s game of wanting to go crazy so he can watch his own reaction.” No doubt she felt she was paying a compliment to a kindred spirit, but her remark angered the director even more than the “Jewish prince” comment in her review of The Gambler, and once more, he called her on it. “You refer to the literary adolescent’s way of playing crazy,” Toback snapped at her. “I went clinically insane for eight days under LSD, at nineteen, as you well know. It was the seminal event of my life. And you, who have never experienced insanity, don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. And for you to deliberately throw in a line like that is embarrassing and lightweight and not worthy of you.” Pauline was quite taken aback: By now Toback was a close friend and a regular companion at screenings.
Another film that brought her kineticist’s reaction was Brian De Palma’s latest, The Fury. Like Carrie, it dealt with a form of telekinesis, this time belonging to two young people who share a psychic gift and as a result are being used as pawns by the U.S. government, which plots to employ them as secret intelligence weapons. Pauline shrugged off The Fury’s ramshackle plot and gushed that it went “so far beyond anything in his last film, Carrie, that that now seems like child’s play . . . De Palma is one of the few directors in the sound era to make a horror film that is so visually compelling that a viewer seems to have entered a mythic night world.... We can hear the faint, distant sound of De Palma cackling with pleasure.” Again, she found few critics who agreed with her, let alone shared her unrestrained enthusiasm. When she wrote, “No Hitchcock thriller was ever so intense, went so far, or had so many ‘classic’ sequences,” even many of her die-hard fans wondered if she might temporarily have gone off the rails.
At a lecture Pauline had delivered at Lincoln