Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [170]
Jane Fonda, while campaigning for her own Vietnam project, Coming Home, spoke out angrily against The Deer Hunter because of its depiction of the Vietcong, and despite her enthusiasm for the film Pauline was inclined to agree, finding it one of the few big Hollywood movies of the era to display a right-wing sensibility, in which Cimino betrayed “his xenophobic yellow-peril imagination. It’s part of the narrowness of the film’s vision that there is no suggestion that there ever was a sense of community among the Vietnamese which was disrupted.... The impression a viewer gets is that if we did some bad things over there we did them ruthlessly but impersonally; the Vietcong were cruel and sadistic. The film seems to be saying that the Americans had no choice, but the V.C. enjoyed it.” She guessed that many would dismiss the movie because of its “traditional isolationist message: Asia should be left to the Asians, and we should stay where we belong, but if we have to go over there we’ll show how tough we are.” Yet despite her reservations, Pauline could see that The Deer Hunter showed evidence of tremendous artistry. Once more she had plenty of praise for Robert De Niro, who had developed into an actor capable of illuminating an opaque character. “We have come to expect a lot from De Niro: miracles,” she wrote. “And he delivers them—he brings a bronze statue almost to life.” (In later years, Pauline’s friend Daryl Chin would tease her about her early support of De Niro, saying, “Pardon me—he’s someone you babysat!”)
Her review of The Deer Hunter was one of the most vital pieces she had written in some time, demonstrating again her Agee-like talent for working out her feelings on the page. The future Entertainment Weekly film critic Owen Gleiberman was still a student at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor when Pauline’s review of The Deer Hunter appeared. “When I see something as huge, as rich, and as garbled as The Deer Hunter, regardless of how secure I am with my own feelings,” Gleiberman wrote to her, “I feel slightly off balance until I get a look at what you had to say. And what you’ve said has, I believe, made a difference in my life.”
At year’s end Pauline saw the most purely enjoyable movie she’d seen in years—Philip Kaufman’s remake of the 1956 low-budget science fiction classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The original version, about a community being systematically supplanted by pods from outer space that hatch perfect, desensitized human replicas, had been a surprise hit when it was released and was still a favorite in campus revivals, as it had come to be read as a biting commentary on the McCarthyist paranoia of the ’50s. The remake swapped the original’s small-town California setting for San Francisco but retained the paranoid atmosphere.
Pauline thought that for pure movie thrills, the new Invasion of the Body Snatchers was “the American movie of the year—a new classic.” She approved of the change of scene, because Kaufman and the screenwriter, W. D. (Rick) Richter, had beautifully captured the strays and eccentric artists that populated San Francisco. What better setting for a movie about the dangers of creeping conformity? She felt that eccentricity was “the San Francisco brand of humanity.... There’s something at stake in this movie: the right of freaks to be freaks—which is much more appealing than the right of ‘normal’ people to be normal.” She also had special praise for Veronica Cartwright, who played the film’s second female lead. Cartwright was an actress whose work Pauline had been following closely for some time. In her review of Cartwright’s 1975 film, Inserts, Pauline had compared her to Jeanne Eagels—“a grown-up, quicksilver talent.” Writing about Invasion, she observed that Cartwright possessed “such instinct for the camera that even when she isn’t doing anything special, what she’s feeling registers. She doesn’t steal scenes—she gives them an extra comic