Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [197]
Pauline found the movie “a genuine oddity—like Night of the Iguana performed by a company of seraphim.” But Altman’s old magic relit the screen, and Pauline’s joy in welcoming him back was almost palpable:
Altman keeps looking at the world, and it’s never the same; what we’re responding to is his consciousness at work (and play). The sunlight coming through the shop’s glass front and the dusty pastel colors are part of the film’s texture, along with the women’s hair and heads and hands, which are always touching, moving. Present and past interpenetrate, and Altman keeps everything in motion. (The close-ups are pauses, not full stops.) His feeling for the place is almost as tactile as his feeling for the performers. When the characters’ passions well up the camera is right there, recording the changes in their neck muscles, their arms, their cheeks. But it never crowds them.
One of the fascinating aspects of the careers of so many movie stars is that their peak years are usually over so quickly. What seemed fresh and spontaneous and original about them—the very qualities that made the public take to them in the first place—can seem like mannerisms and limitations. Only a few years earlier, Jane Fonda had seemed primed for a long run as the screen’s premier actress, but after her stiff performances in 9 to 5 and On Golden Pond, it was clear her peak years were finished. Meryl Streep was rapidly rising as the most important actress on the screen, complete with the validation of uniformly excellent reviews and a Time cover story, but Pauline continued to resist her charms. Streep’s much-celebrated technique was just that to Pauline—lacking the warm glow of a genuine personality behind it. In Still of the Night, Streep’s 1982 psychological thriller, Pauline thought the actress didn’t “resemble a living person; her face is gaunt, her skin has become alabaster. She seems to have chosen to do a Meryl Streep parody; she’s like some creature from the moon trying to be a movie star.”
Streep’s big film of the year, and the one that would win her her second Academy Award, was Sophie’s Choice, based on William Styron’s bestselling novel about a Polish holocaust survivor living with her abusive boyfriend in Brooklyn. The film was, for Pauline, “encrusted with the weighty culture of big themes: evil, tortured souls, guilt.” In her review, she did a masterful job at identifying again what troubled her most about the actress:
Streep is very beautiful at times, and she does amusing, nervous bits of business, like fidgeting with a furry boa—her fingers twiddling with our heartstrings. She has, as usual, put thought and effort into her work. But something about her puzzles me: after I’ve seen her in a movie, I can’t visualize her from the neck down. Is it possible that as an actress she makes herself into a blank and then focuses all her attention on only one thing—the toss of her head, for example, in Manhattan, her accent here? Maybe, by bringing an unwarranted intensity to one facet of a performance, she in effect decorporealizes herself. This could explain why her movie heroines don’t seem to be full characters, and why there are no incidental joys to be had from watching her. It could be that in her zeal to be an honest actress she allows nothing to escape her conception of a performance. Instead of trying to achieve freedom in front of the camera, she’s predetermining what it records.
Years later, in an interview, Streep admitted that Pauline’s review of Sophie’s Choice affected her deeply. “I’m incapable of not thinking about what Pauline wrote, and you know what I think?” the actress said. “That Pauline was a poor Jewish girl who was at Berkeley with all these rich Pasadena WASPs with long blond hair, and the heartlessness of them got her.” Certainly many of the actresses Pauline admired most onscreen were Jewish—from Sylvia Sidney and Paulette Goddard to Barbra Streisand, Goldie Hawn, and Debra Winger. But Streep’s theory ignores