Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [204]
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Few actors ever drew forth Pauline’s venom in quite the same way that Clint Eastwood did. As the years rolled on, her dislike for his particular brand of monotone machismo had ripened into near-contempt. She considered it a sign of the way movies had gone off track that Martin Scorsese was now (she believed) in decline, and Robert Altman was all but a back number—yet Eastwood’s star remained as potent as ever. His one-dimensional screen personality had weathered the years, and unlike old-time action and Western stars such as Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea, he wasn’t appearing in increasingly marginalized vehicles. Rather, there was a new weight, even a self-conscious “importance” about his films. When he began to be hailed as an artist for involving himself with more serious subject matter, Pauline was dumbfounded.
Pale Rider, released in the summer of 1985, was a good example: a Western about a Mysterious Stranger who appears to help a scraggly band of gold miners stand up to an evil land baron. Eastwood played this ethereal avenger role with a straight face, and Pauline hooted at the pretensions of the high-toned Western: “This tall, gaunt-faced Stranger sometimes wears clerical garb and is addressed as Preacher,” she wrote. “When he takes off his shirt, his back has shapely bullet holes, like stigmata, and when he opens his mouth sententious words of wisdom fall out of it—gems like ‘There’s plain few problems can’t be solved with a little sweat and some hard work.’ If this is how people beyond the grave talk, I’d just as soon they didn’t come back to visit.” The movie, however, was a hit, and Eastwood continued to maintain, in Pauline’s words, “a career out of his terror of expressiveness.” Several of Pauline’s friends thought her vilification of Eastwood revealed a certain attraction to him. “A lot of people thought she was really turned on by Clint Eastwood,” said Ray Sawhill. “He was the big, macho, alpha male, and Pauline just loved beating up on him. And I think there were reasons why she loved beating up on him.”
Her disappointment in the path taken by Scorsese surfaced once more in her review of After Hours, the director’s comic nightmare about a man who loses his money and spends an insane night stumbling through flakiest SoHo. After Hours had the chaotic, nothing-can-go-right structure of a bad dream, and it had amusing performances and bits of business, but Pauline thought Scorsese’s tone couldn’t sustain itself. “His work here is livelier and more companionable than it has been in recent years; the camera scoots around, making jokes—or, at least, near-jokes,” she wrote. “But the movie keeps telling you to laugh, even though these near-jokes are about all you get. Soon it becomes clear that the episodes aren’t going anywhere—that what you’re seeing is a random series of events in a picture that just aspires to be an entertaining trifle and doesn’t make it.” It disturbed her that Scorsese seemed to be “using his skills . . . like a hired hand, making a vacuous, polished piece of consumer goods—all surface.”
In some ways, the essential Pauline hadn’t changed over the years: In the mid-’80s she was still much more inclined to embrace an oddball trifle such as Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (“I liked the movie’s unimportance. It isn’t saying anything”) than she was a big-budget, prestige picture like Sydney Pollack’s Out of Africa (“Meryl Streep has used too many foreign accents on us, and this new one gives her utterances an archness, a formality—it puts quotation marks around everything she says”) or Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple. The film, based on the enormously popular novel by Alice Walker about the lifetime of indignities suffered by Celie, a poor, battered, sexually abused Georgia black woman, before she eventually finds her own path to self-respect, marked Spielberg’s first venture