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She Also Found It at the Movies
There are some film critics I read to get a sense of whether a movie is worth seeing and, perhaps, to get some idea of how I might approach a particular film. Over the last 25 years or so, the movie critic I have found most helpful in that regard is David Edelstein. I used to love reading his reviews at slate.com, and he often had a real influence over whether I would end up going to see a movie.
But there are other reasons you might be drawn to film critics. I have never read Anthony Lane in the New Yorker to decide whether to see a film. I read him instead for the wit, the charm, the flair. Only Lane could write this of the titular figure of the 1999 film The Mummy, “If you made a nourishing winter soup out of white beans and Terminator, this fellow is what you would find at the bottom of the pot.”
And then there’s a third set of film critics I turn to, this one consisting of three remarkable writers: James Agee, David Thomson, and Pauline Kael. These three I admire for the quality of their sensibility, the intelligence and the passionate attention that they bring to—well, first, to watching movies, and only then to writing about them. It doesn’t matter, it never matters, whether I agree with them.
I have some especially strong disagreements with David Thomson. Some of his judgments are completely alien to my own. He loves some things that do nothing for me—primarily the work of The Archers (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger), which Martin Scorsese adores as well. So the fact I get nothing out of those movies probably says more about me than it does about them. Still, anything David Thomson writes about Powell and Pressburger I’m eager to read. Conversely, he intensely dislikes Billy Wilder, whom he thinks of as sour and cynical. He doesn’t think Billy Wilder is bad, but he thinks his screenplays and especially the movies that he directs are marred by cynicism. I think that’s a total misreading of Billy Wilder, but, again, I’ll read everything that Thomson says about him—or any other artist, for that matter.
Maybe because he was a novelist and poet as well as screenwriter himself, I have a particular love for James Agee and his way of registering complicated responses, mixed feelings. I especially delight in his review of The Best Years of our Lives (1946): “At its worst,” he writes, “this story is very annoying in its patness, its timidity, its slithering attempts to pretend to face and by that pretense to dodge in the most shameful way possible its own fullest meanings and possibilities.” He goes on in this dismissive vein for some time: “In fact,” he writes, “it would be possible, I don’t doubt, to call the whole picture just one long pious piece of deceit and self-deceit, embarrassed by hot flashes of talent, conscience, truthfulness, and dignity.” But then, at the end of the review, he admits that he absolutely adored The Best Years of Our Lives and promises to write his next essay to explain why. That sort of investment of himself in watching movies, paying attention not only to the movies but also to what the movies do to him, how they affect him, and then writing vividly and precisely about the quality of his experience in the movie theater—all of that is simply extraordinary.
Indeed, the only writer I find who can outdo Agee in that respect is Pauline Kael. I should add that Kael is completely useless to me as a guide to movies. If she loves something, I might love it or I might hate it. If she hates something, well, same thing. It’s not that we necessarily have opposing responses or opposing ideas. I simply cannot reliably map what I see at the movies onto what she sees.
But that is not the point. I don’t read Pauline Kael to track my sensibility with hers on an aesthetic oscilloscope. I read her because I think she—more than any writer I know, including Agee—brings the whole of herself to writing about movies. And so the best way to think about Kael’s writing is not as movie film criticism; that would be