Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [196]
Throughout 1982 there was still the occasional marvelous personal film that she loved writing about and did her best to champion. One was Alan Parker’s marital drama Shoot the Moon, about which she observed, “I’m a little afraid to say how good I think Shoot the Moon is—I don’t want to set up the kind of bad magic that might cause people to say they were led to expect so much that they were disappointed.” Bo Goldman, whose script for Melvin and Howard she had admired so much, had come through again, with a story that wasn’t “just about marriage; it’s about the family that is created, and how that whole family reacts to the knotted, disintegrating relationship of the parents.” She felt that Diane Keaton had redeemed herself for her weak performance in Reds, and Albert Finney, playing her tormented husband, was her match—they gave “the kind of performances that in the theater become legendary.” Pauline’s advocacy did not help Shoot the Moon, which grossed only a little more than $7 million on a budget of $12 million.
As the year went on, she also admired Jean-Jacques Beineix’s French thriller Diva, thinking the director someone “who understands the pleasures to be had from a picture that doesn’t take itself very seriously.” And she was delighted by Steven Spielberg’s captivating fantasy E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, which she described as “a dream of a movie—a bliss-out.” She was encouraged to see Spielberg applying his prodigious imagination to a touching, human story; to her, it made up for the mechanical excesses of Raiders of the Lost Ark: “He’s like a boy soprano lilting with joy all through E.T., and we’re borne along by his voice.”
It was reassuring when she celebrated the return to form of Robert Altman with Come Back to the Five & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. She was fond of telling people that she couldn’t quite account for Altman’s talent—that when he was on his game, he was remarkable, but when he was off it, one would never guess that he had any talent at all. Come Back to the Five & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean began life as a play by Ed Graczyk, which Altman directed on Broadway in early 1982. It got downbeat reviews and ran for only fifty-two performances. Graczyk had written the kind of well-made play that had become a staple of Broadway in the ’40s and ’50s—the kind in which the characters’ self-delusions and hypocrisies are systematically revealed—the sort of thing that seemed antithetical to Altman’s intuitive style. It concerned the reunion of a James Dean fan club on the twentieth anniversary of the star’s death, and Pauline thought that in its “fake-poetic, fake magical way, it reeks of the worst of William Inge, of Tennessee Williams misunderstood.” After its failure onstage Altman had filmed it for under $1 million with most of the same cast. Cher, Sandy Dennis, Karen Black, and Kathy Bates all reprised their roles, and Pauline thought that what the director had gotten out of them was remarkable:
If the roles made better sense, the actresses might not be able to plunge so far down into themselves or pull up so much emotion. It’s because this glib, religioso play is so derivative that the actors have found so much depth in it. When actors peel away layers of inhibition, they feel they’re uncovering “truth” and it’s traditional for directors and acting teachers to call it that. But this truth may be derived from their stored-up pop mythology—atrocity stories from sources as diverse as comic books, TV, and Joan Didion, and tales of sacrificial heroes and heroines that go back beyond the birth of movies to the first storytellers. “Truthful” acting may be