Book Review: A lingering 'Afterglow'

"It was Saturday night and we had a date." So begins "Afterglow," Francis Davis' all-too-brief account of his last real conversation with Pauline Kael. Oh, how I envy him! Imagine! An actual date with Pauline Kael -- to see a movie, of course.

From the 1960s until her retirement in 1991, Kael reigned as "the queen bee of American movie critics" at The New Yorker magazine. As a young man, Davis became a fan of Kael's writing. He sent her a copy of his first published book -- a collection of essays about jazz -- requesting a blurb. She readily complied. From a shared love of film and good writing grew a friendship lasting until Kael's death from Parkinson's disease on Sept. 3, 2001.

Not long before that date, Kael sat down with Davis to record this interesting chat about her life and her opinions about movies and the current culture. She seems as bright and quick as in her prime when legions of loyal fans, myself included, waited eagerly for her next review.

When someone achieves the status of Pauline Kael, it is natural to ask why she was so great and arguably the most influential critic of her time -- and perhaps ever.

A reasonable proof would be simply to read her collected works. Davis makes the case that "No one else has written as vividly about movies, or about the experience of seeing movies." Lore surrounding the diminutive Kael rumbles with admiration and laughter about how physically involved she became while watching a movie. Laughing, rocking in her seat, talking to the screen were all part of the experience for her. She viewed intensely, completely and retained almost perfect recall of what she had seen. She never saw films more than once, a fact amazing to film buffs. She couldn't understand why anyone would want to see something twice.

Reading Davis' book convinced me Kael's greatness lay in the fact that she absolutely loved films and would write for nothing and cared not at all for others' opinions of her opinions. She possessed a sureness in her own point of view developed rather early in her life when she ran a repertory cinema in San Francisco and wrote up program notes.

Over the years and after she became famous, she was offered teaching positions at several universities, but the academic life was not for her. She couldn't "face it," even though it provided a secure living, which writing did not. Her chosen path "was insane financially," she said, describing how she wrote constantly for magazines and only earned a few hundred a year. Yet she did not wish to "write academic English in an attempt to elevate movies, because I think that actually lowers them."

"I loved writing," she told Davis. "I really loved the gamble of writing, the risk-taking. I loved the speed of it, the fact that you had your say and moved on to something else." That was the reason she hated Hollywood when she tried working there. "Nothing was ever over and done with. You would nag over the same material endlessly."

Kael found her perfect world during her 30 years at The New Yorker. She was speedy, cranking out weekly reviews and opinion pieces. She really got it, the love affair of America with the movies, and she helped foster and intensify that love. She had the knack of discovering truly great films, not what we call today blockbusters, but important work needing a push to get it before the public, Just about single-handedly, she turned "Last Tango in Paris" into a huge hit. And when she decided to send a valentine to Cary Grant, well, he became the subject of her legendary essay "The Man from Dream City."

On the other hand, no one could be more cutting than Kael -- such as her description of Dyan Cannon "looking a bit like Lauren Bacall and a bit like Jeanne Moreau, but the wrong bits." Cannon laughed it off. Kael's motive was not vicious ruination. She simply wrote as she thought and spoke, with clarity and honesty and she seemed always to be right.

It's just a fact that when one reads someone regularly, especially a writer with a voice as singular as Kael's, one forms a kind of friendship. I miss her. I know I can always pull one of her books off the shelf and re-read her reviews and essays, but it's wonderful to have the fresh material in this book. I'm glad to know she stayed vital to the end, watching movies through the miracle of videos when she could no longer go out to a theater.

One of the delicious pleasures of this book is to find out at last what she thought of certain more recent films. She loved "Three Kings." Yes! I wrote in the margin. She called "American Beauty" "heavy and turgid." Another exclamation point! She would not even go to see "Gladiator." Thank you, Pauline!

It turns out she did not retire from The New Yorker strictly because of illness. Rather, she quite suddenly could not go on writing about terrible movies and movies were becoming so bad. "I love writing about movies when I can discover something in them -- when I can get something out of them that I can share with people," she told Davis.

She left the darkened theater and largely kept her thoughts from her public. I really felt the loss of her special light. Davis gives some of that back to us in this very welcome "Afterglow."

("Afterglow: A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael" by Francis Davis, DaCapo Press, 126 pages, $18)