If I could demolish any one idea in the history of film criticism, I think it would be the often stated canard that Pauline Kael wrote flashy exuberant prose, spilling her gut reactions to a movie all over the page — but that she wasn’t an “analytical” writer. That opinion is miles-out-of-the-ballpark wrong, and it’s almost certainly sexist. Yet what’s most annoying about it is that it’s based on the whole second-rate, boring-college-seminar idea of what “analysis” is: a quality that somehow exists apart from emotional excitement. When Pauline Kael reviewed a movie, any movie at all, her writing pulsated with life, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t parsing everything with supreme braininess and reasoning and inquiry. The analysis was seared into every word, woven into the expressive power of her free-style flow. Her thoughts — incisive, incantatory, indelible — occupied the other side of the coin from her feelings.
- 2/10/2019
- by Owen Gleiberman
- Variety Film + TV
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