Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [203]
In early 1985 Pauline surprised her longtime readers by sharply deviating from her reviewing past: She gave her approval to a David Lean picture, A Passage to India, based on the famous E. M. Forster novel. While the book was not the sort that she responded to as enthusiastically as she had The Bostonians or the great Russian novels, she did feel that A Passage to India was “suggestive and dazzlingly empathic.”
She believed Lean’s film version to be “an admirable piece of work, because the director’s control”—the very quality for which she had attacked him earlier—had “a kind of benign precision . . . because of the performers (and the bright-colored, fairy-tale vividness of the surroundings.)” Lean’s reading of the book was “intelligent and enjoyable, and if his technique is to simplify and to spell everything out in block letters, this kind of clarity has its own formal strength. It may not be the highest praise to say that a movie is orderly and dignified or that it’s like a well-cared-for, beautifully oiled machine, but of its kind this Passage to India is awfully good.”
What intrigued her most about the film was that it seemed “informed by a spirit of magisterial self-hatred. That’s its oddity: Lean’s grand ‘objective’ manner—he never touches anything without defining it and putting it in its place—seems to have developed out of the values he attacks. It’s an imperial bookkeeper’s style—no loose ends. It’s also the style that impressed the Indians, and shamed them because they couldn’t live up to it. It’s the style of the conqueror—who is here the guilt-ridden conqueror but the conqueror nevertheless.” Forster did not neatly tie up the novel’s situations; Lean was a careful, precise filmmaker who arranged everything neatly in place. “What’s remarkable about the film is how two such different temperaments as Forster’s and Lean’s could come together,” Pauline wrote.
For Pauline, the most exhilarating movie of the summer of 1985 was John Huston’s mob family comedy Prizzi’s Honor. Huston was in the midst of his late-career resurgence, which had begun with The Man Who Would Be King; Prizzi’s Honor was a beautifully sustained satire—the characters are delightfully corrupt, discussing murder in the same calm, matter-of-fact terms that most families use to discuss house payments and insurance matters. Pauline wrote, “If John Huston’s name were not on Prizzi’s Honor, I’d have thought a fresh new talent had burst on the scene, and he’d certainly be the hottest new director in Hollywood. . . . It’s like The Godfather acted out by The Munsters, with passionate, lyrical arias from Italian operas pointing up their low-grade sentimentality.” At seventy-eight, Huston’s touch was as sure as it been in his glory days; Pauline approved of Jack Nicholson, who she thought would “do anything for the role he’s playing, and he has a just about infallible instinct for how far he can take the audience with him.” She also heralded the breakthrough of the director’s daughter, Anjelica Huston, who played the family granddaughter Maerose like “a Borgia princess, a high-fashion Vampira who moves like a swooping bird and talks in a honking Brooklynese that comes out of the corner of her twisted mouth.... she has the imperiousness of a Maria Callas or a Silvana Mangano.”
For all her excitement there was a certain lack of cohesiveness in her review of Prizzi’s