Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [215]
While Broadcast News was an intelligent, tartly observed look at a major shift in America’s culture, Pauline found it ultimately too neat and facile. “There’s not even a try for any style or tension in Broadcast News,” she wrote. “It’s all episodic, like a TV series.... Jim Brooks has made a movie about three people who lose themselves in their profession, and it’s all cozy and clean and clever. He plays everything right down the middle. He can’t seem to imagine having a conflicted, despairing relationship with your profession.”
Still, she felt essential goodwill toward the picture, and she admired the performances of all three stars. But she didn’t feel that Broadcast News was good enough to sweep the New York Film Critics Circle’s 1987 awards—which it did.
As always, Pauline could be counted on not to fall in line with her fellow critics, many of whom found Louis Malle’s latest effort, Au revoir les enfants, among the year’s finest pictures. It was an embroidered account of an episode from Malle’s childhood, when the Catholic boarding school he attended hid a number of Jewish boys among the students—boys who were later uncovered by the Gestapo and sent to Auschwitz. It was a dignified, stately, nobly restrained piece of moviemaking, and the critics, while admiring Malle’s craftsmanship, were also quite moved by the subject matter itself. Malle made no bones about saying to the press that he considered it his finest achievement.
As always, this sort of serious self-awareness was a red flag to Pauline, who thought that Au revoir les enfants suffered from an overdose of subdued good taste that kept the audience at a steady remove from the story. “The camera is so discreet it always seems about ten feet too far away,” she wrote. She found that Gaspard Manesse, as Julien Quentin, the character Malle based on himself, was a bit of a blank, “directed so that he never engages us; we can’t look into him, or into anyone else.” The end of her review was vintage Pauline, exhorting her readers not to allow themselves to be easily manipulated by Malle’s story:
Yes, it gets to you by the end. How could it not? But you may feel pretty worn down—by how accomplished it is, and by all the aching, tender shots of Jean [the Jewish boy in hiding]. He’s photographed as if he were a piece of religious art: Christ in his early adolescence. There’s something unseemly about the movie’s obsession with his exotic beauty—as if the French-German Jews had come from the far side of the moon. And does he have to be so brilliant, and a gifted pianist, and courageous? Would the audience not mourn him if he were just an average schmucky kid with pimples?
The old guard at The New Yorker mostly gave a cold shoulder to the film version of Jay McInerney’s bestselling 1984 paperback original, Bright Lights, Big City, which became a kind of Catcher in the Rye for the coked-up club crowd of 1980s Manhattan. The main character, Jamie, was based on McInerney himself, in the days when he briefly served as a fact-checker at The New Yorker while submerging himself in the downtown disco scene. There were a number of characters lifted directly from the offices of The New Yorker, among them Jamie’s fellow fact-checker Yasu Wade, a character that was a direct hit at Pauline’s good friend Craig Seligman, who had long since left the magazine