Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [221]
There were, unfortunately, signs of her fatigue showing up on the pages of The New Yorker. She liked Stephen Frears’s The Grifters, based on Jim Thompson’s book about a trio of con artists, but she wasn’t quite able to convey the movie’s pulse and originality in her review. She also liked Martin Scorsese’s latest, Goodfellas, and while she thought the film missed greatness because Scorsese and his scriptwriter, Nicholas Pileggi (who adapted his own book), hadn’t shaped the material, she acknowledged that “the moviemaking has such bravura that you respond as if you were at a live performance.”
She took aim at one of the year’s biggest, Dances with Wolves, the drama about a Civil War soldier who befriends the Sioux and eventually becomes a tribal member. “There’s nothing affected about Costner’s acting or directing,” she wrote. “You hear his laid-back, surfer accent; you see his deliberate goofy faints and falls, and all the close-ups of his handsomeness. This epic was made by a bland megalomaniac. (The Indians should have named him Plays with Camera.) You look at that untroubled face and know he can make everything lightweight.”
In December she made the very last of her lost-cause pitches, this time for Karel Reisz’s Everybody Wins, with Debra Winger as a flaked-out hooker involved in a mystery in a small New England town. The movie was sneaked into release early in 1990 and bombed, but now, nearly a year later, Pauline exhorted her readers to catch it on VHS. She had a touching observation about the fate of Everybody Wins that indicated the depths of her discouragement: “For a brief period in the late sixties and early seventies, moviegoers seemed willing to be guided through a movie by their intuition and imagination; if this slyly funny picture about the spread of corruption had been released then, it might have been considered a minor classic.”
It was that period that she hoped, against all evidence to the contrary, might somehow be resuscitated in some form or another. But what had happened to the movies went far beyond the blockbuster mentality and the studio’s obsession with repeated formulas and marketing strategies. The past decade had seen a steady erosion of the pride of place in the culture that movies had once held. A great deal of that development was a function of the video revolution: The ideas of movies as an event, an actual performance unfolding before you, was no longer relevant; now films could be experienced over several nights at home, robbing them of the impact they once had on audiences. In New York the booming video industry had proved to be the death knell of the great abundance of revival theaters. Critics, as a result, were fated to become less and less important. It was a good time for Pauline to stop regular reviewing.
One evening that January she had shown up at the Broadway Screening Room to see Paul Mazursky’s new comedy, Scenes from a Mall, costarring Woody Allen and Bette Midler. One of the few people in attendance was Owen Gleiberman, who got into a conversation with her about Jonathan Demme’s latest, Silence of the Lambs. Pauline hadn’t liked it at all—she felt Demme was selling out by making a highly commercial story in which he wasn’t particularly interested and that didn’t play to any of his strengths as a director. She seemed to sense that Silence of the Lambs was going to be a big hit for him, which it was—it would even earn him the Academy