Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [208]
The first half of 1986 continued to bring few films that fully engaged Pauline. She was quite taken with Paul Mazursky’s Down and Out in Beverly Hills, a reworking of Jean Renoir’s classic comedy Boudu Saved from Drowning, and she thought the movie’s view of the new money of Beverly Hills was wonderfully soft-edged and beautifully realized—the kind of generous-spirited social satire she always loved. For some years she had been an unabashed fan of Bette Midler, but she also perceived that hers was the kind of outsized talent that was going to have difficulty finding the right movie roles. In Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Pauline thought that Midler had “never before been this seductive on the screen. This is only the fourth picture she has starred in, and you see a softer, less funky Midler; she’s playing the role of a bored, dissatisfied housewife who has something extra—a warped charm rather like that of Teri Garr, but riper, juicier.” She found Geraldine Page giving one of the year’s most acclaimed performances in The Trip to Bountiful, nearly as actressy as she had back in 1961 in the screen version of Summer and Smoke. And she resisted joining in the chorus of praise hurled at Woody Allen’s new picture, Hannah and Her Sisters, about the romantic entanglements of three New York women. Pauline’s notes are especially revealing here: “Allen’s idea of movie acting is the reading of lines,” she scribbled to herself. “It doesn’t just repeat his work, it repeats itself.” In her printed review she wrote, “The movie is a little stale, and it suggests the perils of inbreeding. It might be time for Woody Allen to make a film with a whole new set of friends, or, at least, to take a long break from his sentimentalization of New York City.” Pauline often told friends that she wanted to carry a Harpo Marx seltzer bottle around with her and use it to squirt certain characters on the screen who irritated her. Writer Allen Barra remembered that she considered Sam Waterston as the smug architect in Hannah and Her Sisters a good candidate for squirting. “I don’t want to hurt him,” she said. “I just want to squirt him.”
Early 1986 was a frantic period: Pauline spent whatever little time was left between New Yorker deadlines promoting her latest collection of reviews, State of the Art, published by Dutton, where Billy Abrahams had moved and where she had followed him. In the introduction she cued readers to her thoughts on the changes in the movie industry during the 1980s, which she chose to signify by departing from her usual sexually tinged book title. (The original choice had been Spitting Images.) “It seemed time for a change; this has not been a period for anything like Grand Passions. I hope that State of the Art will sound ominous and sweeping and just slightly clinical.” While promoting the book, she told interviewers that although she admired the technological advances in cinematography and sound, she was constantly disappointed that the movies had lost the riskiness they’d developed in the previous decade—now they were simply too square for her. Ultimately, State of the Art didn’t sell nearly as well as many of her previous books had done: The net sales of the clothbound and paperback versions combined added up to 14,944.
For much of the 1980s Pauline had suffered from fairly steady bouts of heart trouble—the lining of her heart was perilously thin, and she had attacks of angina. She tried