Rereadings: Pauline Kael's "Reeling"

This is the fifth in a series in which I’ll revisit some of my favorite books by New Yorker writers and try to express why I like them so much. Today’s selection is Pauline Kael’s splendid Reeling (1976).

Reeling is a collection of over seventy movie reviews that Kael wrote for The New Yorker, 1972-1975. It includes some of her best work: “Tango” (on Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris); “Everyday Inferno” (on Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets); “Movieland – The Bum’s Paradise” (on Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye); “Love and Coca-Cola” (on Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us); “Fathers and Sons” (on Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, Part II); “Beverly Hills as a Big Bed” (on Hal Ashby’s Shampoo); and “Coming: Nashville” (on Robert Altman’s Nashville). 

Notice that three of those pieces are on Robert Altman. Kael loved Altman’s work. If you want to know what her governing aesthetic is, read her reviews of Altman. She praised him for his “glancing touch,” his “relaxed awareness,” his “organic style of moviemaking that tells a story without the clanking of plot.” “He’s not a pusher.” “He finds his story through the actors” and “through accidents of weather and discoveries along the way.”

There are some undervalued gems in this collection, too. I love her review of Steven Spielberg’s The Sugarland Express. She writes, “Photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond, the cars shimmer in the hot sunlight; in the dark, the red lights of the police cars are like eerie night-blooming flowers.”

Her dismissal of Terrance Malick’s Badlands is unforgettable: “Malick is a gifted student, and Badlands is an art thing, all right, but I didn’t admire it, I didn’t enjoy it, and I don’t like it.” She concludes: 

And there’s a basic flaw in Malick’s method: he has perceived the movie – he’s done our work instead of his. In place of people and action, with metaphor arising out of the story, he gives us a surface that is all conscious metaphor. Badlands is so preconceived that there’s nothing left to respond to.

Reeling also contains two book reviews – both excellent. One is on Arlene Croce’s The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book; the other is on Norman Mailer’s Marilyn. The Marilyn review contains several classic Kael zingers. Example: “Marilyn is a feat all right: matchstick by matchstick, he’s built a whole damned armada inside a bottle. (Surely he’s getting ready to do Norman? Why leave it to someone who may care less?).”

If you are new to Kael’s work and you are wondering where to start, I recommend Reeling. It covers a golden period of American movies, and shows Kael when she was really rolling, trying to get at what she responds to and why. As she says in her Foreword, “I may not have rendered justice to the best, but I’ve done my damnedest.”