Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [220]
The strategic voting of the NYFCC had long been a challenge. Choices that received a handful of votes in the first ballot could wind up being triumphant in the third and fourth ballots because, as the field of possible winners narrowed and shifted, critics were often more concerned with blocking their least favorite choices than with backing their number-one preferences. It was a frustrating process, and one person who most objected to it was Georgia Brown, a critic at The Village Voice, Andrew Sarris having decamped for The New York Observer. Brown found Driving Miss Daisy’s view of black servitude offensively regressive and sentimental. And when she saw its star Jessica Tandy building a groundswell of support, with none at all going to her costar, Morgan Freeman, she got angry. Her anger intensified as she saw her own favorite, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, losing ground in the balloting process.
Brown’s article on the NYFCC process, “Bite the Ballot,” published in the Voice in early 1989, featured a single illustration: a publicity photo of Pauline. After outlining her frustrations with the voting process, she shifted blame in Pauline’s direction for the move against Do the Right Thing. “Does Kael orchestrate campaigns inside the film societies?” Brown asked. “She may. Last year while being inducted into the NYFCC, the then chairman warned that I might receive some ‘lobbying’ phone calls before the December voting.” That was the most cogent piece of evidence Brown could summon against Pauline, and in her rambling, unfocused article, she strongly suggested that Pauline was guilty of (a) organizing her acolytes in a voting bloc—a point she might have been able to prove had she done her homework—and (b) out-and-out racism because she didn’t back Do the Right Thing—an argument that wasn’t really argued at all. Brown’s article received more attention than it merited and proved to be more damaging than it had any right to be, serving as a sad reminder that the idea and intent behind a movie had become more significant than the results onscreen.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Pauline’s physical condition worsened at a faster rate than she and her doctors had anticipated. Although it was not yet preventing her from keeping up her regular reviewing duties, the task of writing was becoming more and more arduous; she found that the words didn’t pour out of her at the rate they once had. There was no ignoring the fact that the Parkinson’s was affecting her memory; she would start to call a longtime friend or acquaintance, but the name wouldn’t surface. She had always had an excellent memory—for details, for facts, for entire scenes and stretches of dialogue in movies that she hadn’t seen for decades—and more and more she would have to rely on the fact-checkers at The New Yorker to back her up on certain details in a movie review. (Fortunately, it was part of the checkers’ job to go to the movies and take notes, a policy that had been instituted years earlier as a method of dealing with Penelope Gilliatt’s lapses.)
One night in 1990 Pauline sat through a screening of Penny Marshall’s Awakenings, based on Oliver Sacks’s book about treating comatose patients with the drug L-dopa. While it was difficult for her to watch the film, given her struggles to become accustomed to life with Parkinson’s, still, she didn’t go soft on the movie, which she considered a betrayal of the most compelling aspects of its source.
To make matters worse, she was saddened by most of the movies that were being released. She was