Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [209]
In the winter of 1986 Pauline was delighted to celebrate the release of Stephen Frears’s My Beautiful Launderette. With the major studios steadily turning out such dross, it was small, independent pictures such as My Beautiful Launderette, made for less than $1 million, that were drawing an enthusiastic audience—the viewers who used to be defined as the “art house” crowd. Pauline loved this spiky love story set in punk-infested South London, about two young men, Omar and Johnny (Gordon Warnecke and Daniel Day-Lewis), who inject some life into their seedy neighborhood by opening a spiffed-up, trendy laundromat. Pauline wrote, “Frears is responsive to grubby desperation and to the uncouthness and energy in English life—he’s responsive to what went into the punk-music scene and to what goes into teen-age gang life.” She found that “Frears’s editing rhythms that seem so right are actually very odd. My Beautiful Launderette doesn’t feel like any other movie; it’s almost as if he’s cutting to the rhythm of Pakistani-accented English—to what you can hear even in the quirky lilt of the title.” She loved Day-Lewis’s performance as the constantly daring Johnny, and she loved the movie’s light, unself-conscious portrayal of two men in love: “This Johnny wants to make something of himself, and he’ll go through more than his share of humiliation to do it,” she wrote. “He also enjoys wooing the cuddly Omar. He can’t resist touching Omar with his tongue when they’re out on the street, right in front of the launderette, with white-racist rowdies all around them. He can’t resist being frisky, because it’s dangerous, and that makes it more erotic.”
The fact that My Beautiful Launderette and other “small pictures” (such as James Ivory’s A Room with a View) were able to break through and find their audience was heartening to Pauline. The fates of most films now seemed pegged solely on the question of how big a noise could be made about them. This and this alone was seen by the industry—and by a growing part of the audience—as the sole measure of their worth. The strong, cautionary words, the advocacy for smart, risky, creative filmmaking that Pauline had poured forth in her column for years may have been more important than ever, but they seemed increasingly futile. The movie executives who had once read her with great fascination, even when she destroyed their films, now were far less interested in what she had to say. The marketing lords had figured out a way to make certain films—many films—critic-proof. Don Simpson’s power had reached its apex, while Pauline’s was on the decline.
All of this was very much on her mind when she reviewed Top Gun, a Tom Cruise action picture about fighter pilots that became one of the top box-office hits of the summer of 1986. It was produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, and Pauline wrote, “Selling is what they think moviemaking is about. The result is a new ‘art’ form: the self-referential commercial. Top Gun is a recruiting poster that isn’t concerned with recruiting but with being a poster.”
Still, she advocated steadfastly for the few signs of life she saw on the movie scene. One came with David Lynch’s latest, Blue Velvet. The film belonged to a rather overworked genre: the study of a