Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [217]
For some time a definite weariness seemed to be coloring Pauline’s weekly reviewing. She hadn’t written a truly surprising, expansive, out-on-the-ledge review since the Shoah controversy three years earlier. In her review of Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War, however, she regained some of her old vitality. It was a movie that allowed her to make the most profound emotional connection she had made in years; despite the marked difference in subject matter, Casualties of War might be considered her Shoeshine of the late ’80s. (She even referenced the De Sica film in the first paragraph of her review of the De Palma.) Based on a horrific crime that had taken place in Vietnam in 1966, Casualties of War depicted a group of American G.I.s who get brutally ambushed by Vietcong. When one of them is killed, their sergeant (Sean Penn) snaps, and hatches a plan to retaliate by abducting a Vietnamese girl and raping her. Casualties of War provided Pauline with an opportunity to go into her long-abandoned confessional mode:
We in the audience are put in the man’s position: we’re made to feel the awfulness of being ineffectual. This lifelike defeat is central to the movie. (One hot day on my first trip to New York City, I walked past a group of men on a tenement stoop. One of them, in a sweaty sleeveless T-shirt, stood shouting at a screaming, weeping little boy perhaps eighteen months old. The man must have caught a glimpse of my stricken face, because he called out, “You don’t like it lady? Then how do you like this?” And he picked up a bottle of pink soda pop from the sidewalk and poured it on the baby’s head. Wailing sounds, much louder than before, followed me down the street.)
Pauline thought that Casualties of War showed De Palma plumbing emotional depths that might not have been previously expected of him. She found the picture demonstrated “such seductive, virtuosic control of film craft that he can express convulsions in the unconscious.” But the most dazzling dimension of her lengthy review was the connection she made with some of his earlier thrillers. “In essence, it’s feminist,” she wrote—a judgment that seemed aimed directly at the sensibilities of The Village Voice critics:
I think that in his earlier movies De Palma was always involved in examining (and sometimes satirizing) victimization, but he was often accused of being a victimizer. Some moviegoers (women, especially) were offended by his thrillers; they thought there was something reprehensibly sadistic in his cleverness. He was clever. When people talk about their sex fantasies, their descriptions almost always sound like movies, and De Palma headed right for that linkage: he teased the audience about how susceptible it was to romantic manipulation. Carrie and Dressed to Kill are like lulling erotic reveries that keep getting broken into by scary jokes. He let you know that he was jerking you around and that it was for your amused, childish delight, but a lot of highly vocal people expressed shock. This time, De Palma touches on raw places in people’s reactions to his earlier movies; he gets at the reality that may have made some moviegoers too fearful to enjoy themselves. He goes to the heart of sexual victimization, and he does it with a new authority. The way he makes movies now, it’s as if he were saying, “What is getting older if it isn’t learning more ways that you’re vulnerable?”
Pauline’s was the most impassioned review that Casualties of War would receive—and she was stunned when she found herself the object of yet another backlash. The Village Voice ran a cover story titled “De Palma’s Latest Outrage.” (The headline was, in fact, a blatant misrepresentation of the article, which happened to be written by Allen Barra, who wrote the newspaper a letter informing readers that the title was not his choice.) None of this controversy, however, helped Casualties of War achieve box-office success—a failure that Pauline took extremely hard.
Daniel Day-Lewis had broken through in the mid-’80s as a screen actor