Interesting Emendations: Pauline Kael's "Bonnie and Clyde"

Reading Richard Brody’s “Ten Greatest Films of All Time” list ("The Top Ten," newyorker.com, May 15, 2012), I found myself considering what my own list might look like. One film I’d definitely include is Arthur Penn’s great Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Rereading Pauline Kael’s classic review of it (“Bonnie and Clyde,” The New Yorker, October 21, 1967), I was intrigued by the line, “There is a kind of American poetry in a stickup gang seen chasing across the bedraggled backdrop of the Depression (as true in its way as Nabokov’s vision of Humbert Humbert and Lolita in the cross-country world of motels) – as if crime were the only activity in a country stupefied by poverty.” It’s an inspired sentence, containing a number of Kael’s signature moves: praise in terms of poetry, literary reference, use of parenthesis. Interestingly, she deploys this line to set up a significant criticism of Penn’s direction:

But Arthur Penn doesn’t quite have the toughness of mind to know it; its not what he means by poetry. His squatters’-jungle scene is too ‘eloquent,’ like a poster making an appeal, and the Parker-family-reunion sequence is poetic in the gauzy mode. He makes the sequence a fancy lyric interlude, like a number in a musical (Funny Face, to be exact); it’s too ‘imaginative’ – a literal dust bowl, as thoroughly becalmed as Sleeping Beauty’s garden. The movie becomes dreamy-soft where it should be hard (and hard-edged).

This passage not only pinpoints one of Bonnie and Clyde’s few weaknesses, it also illuminates Kael’s notion of cinematic poetry. One of her favorite expressions of movie love was to call a film “poetry.” For example:

“La Grande Illusion is poetry” (“Retrospective Reviews: Movies Remembered with Pleasure,” I Lost it at the Movies, 1965)

“Yet it’s an astonishing piece of work, an uneasy mixture of violent pulp and grandiosity, with an enraptured view of common life – poetry of the commonplace” (“The God-Bless-America Symphony,” When the Lights Go Down, 1980)

“It’s a traumatic poem of violence” (“The Wild Bunch,” 5001 Nights at the Movies, 1991)

“An amazingly high-strung, feverishly poetic movie about Cain and Abel as American brothers living on a lettuce farm in California in the years just before the First World War” (“East of Eden,” 5001 Nights at the Movies, 1991)

The above passage from “Bonnie and Clyde” indicates Kael’s notion of poetry – “toughness of mind,” not “gauzy,”  “hard (and hard-edged).”

Interestingly, when Kael wrote her capsule “Bonnie and Clyde” review (collected in 5001 Nights at the Movies) for the magazine’s “Goings On About Town,” condensing the original ten-thousand-word essay to 175 words, she distilled the “There is a kind of American poetry” line to its essence, deleting the parenthetical comparison with Nabokov’s Lolita, and completely omitting her criticism of Penn for not having “the toughness of mind” to do justice to the “kind of American poetry” inherent in the story. The result is a capsule review conveying the impression that there is, in Bonnie and Clyde, “a kind of American poetry in a stickup gang seen chasing across the bedraggled backdrop of the Depression – as if crime were the only activity in a country stupefied by poverty.” It’s a superb line, enacting the poetry it describes. And it comes with an unforgettable soundtrack. I hear it now, mentally, as I write this – bluegrass, banjos - Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs playing their brilliant, jangling, jumping “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” another of Bonnie and Clyde's myriad artful elements. 

"Drive": Lane v. Brody

It’s interesting to see the various ways New Yorker critics treat movie violence. For example, Anthony Lane appears to have little appetite for graphic, Peckinpah-esque bloodletting. In his review of No Country For Old Men (“Hunting Grounds,” The New Yorker, November 12, 2007), he writes:

Acts of monstrosity are coolly perpetrated throughout, but the resulting film strays beyond cool to the verge of the passionless; if Deakins’s camera leans in close to gaze on damaged flesh (we focus on Chigurh’s leg as he swabs and stitches a gunshot wound), that is not because the Coens harbor any tenderness or pity, still less an urge to lament the legacy of violence. They simply retain a juvenile weakness for gore, challenging us to match their sang-froid and saluting Chigurh himself for showing the way.

Note that “juvenile weakness for gore.” The implication is that a more mature approach would eschew luridness. This matches with what Lane says in his recent review of Drive (“Road Kill,” The New Yorker, September 26, 2011):

When James Stewart was deliberately shot in the hand, from close range, in “The Man from Laramie” (1955), we did not witness the bullet enter his flesh, nor did we need to. The director, Anthony Mann, knew that his proper focus, moral as well as physical, should be on Stewart’s face, which turned into a writhing map of outrage, agony, and shame—a peculiar, emasculated shame, as befitted a cowboy who lived by the sweat of his hands. Compare the sequence, in “Drive,” in which Albert Brooks shakes a man’s hand and, holding tight, slices through the veins in his wrist. Brooks—the most prominent presence in the movie, caustically cast against type—tells his victim not to worry. “It’s over, it’s over,” he says, and the pitiless soothing of his voice, as the man’s lifeblood ebbs away, is unforgettable, but it’s difficult to concentrate, because Refn is far too concerned to show the fountain of that blood, and its ridiculous leap. In grabbing our attention, he diverts it from what matters. The horror lingers and seeps; the feelings are sponged away.

Far too concerned to show the fountain of that blood. This reminds me of what Pauline Kael said about The French Connection (“Urban Gothic,” The New Yorker, October 30, 1971): “The only thing that this movie believes in is giving the audience jolts, and you can feel the raw, primitive response in the theatre.”

Compared to Lane, David Denby and Richard Brody seem far more accepting of screen brutality. They scan the violent imagery for meaning. Denby, in his recent review of Haywire (“Flesh and Fantasy,” The New Yorker, January 30, 2012) writes:

The movie is a divertissement; it’s lightweight and almost meaningless except for the fights, which are exceptionally violent. Soderbergh chops up the chronology and keeps us off balance, so we watch each scene knowing no more than Mallory. We’re with her all the way; she fights in order to learn what traps have been laid. For her, fighting is the only means of discovery.

Brody, in his review of Drive (“Spinning Wheels” (“The Front Row,” newyorker.com, September 19, 2011), interprets the show of violence as “an ultimate proof of self-control.” He writes:

Refn doesn’t seem interested in pain but in its infliction—specifically, how blank-faced, soft-spoken people manage to commit mayhem and, at the moment of violent outburst, stay fixed on their plan and maintain a fearsome calm in the face of disgusting gore.

Fighting as “the only means of discovery,” violence as “an ultimate proof of self-control” – these are interesting interpretations. Denby and Brody test the violence to see if there’s an intelligent point to it. But when they read meaning into movie violence they have to be careful they’re not just rationalizing a hack device for “giving the audience jolts.” I watched Drive last night. I found the violence, particularly the elevator scene, in which the Driver repeatedly stomps on a villain’s head, grossly excessive. I think Lane is right to question it. In his review, he says:

We watch as the Driver stamps, time and again, on the skull of a villain in an elevator; but what exactly are we watching, as the camera rests, for a second, on the mashed-up result? Prosthetics, pixellation, pastry dough? The people around me reacted with the eewrrgh sound that has become de rigueur in the viewing of violence, followed by the traditional hasty giggle to pop the tension; even those moviegoers who revel in such a sight, however, might usefully pause to inspect the kick of pleasure that it provokes. No doubt they will have seen much worse, and they will also know that a bursting brain is no more real than a game of Quidditch, yet what perturbs me about a film as careful and as intelligent as “Drive” is its manifest delusion that, in refusing to look away from the minutiae of nastiness, it is actually drawing us closer to the truth about pain.

I agree. I like Lane’s question: “But what exactly are we watching?” Sometimes, what we’re watching, gruesome as it is, has meaning. As Kael observed in her great “Bonnie and Clyde” (The New Yorker, “October 21, 1967), “The dirty reality of death – not suggestions but blood and holes – is necessary.” But, often as not, the violence is there just to give kicks. One of movie criticism’s purposes is to help us make the distinction.

Credit: The above artwork is by Tes One. It appears in The New Yorker (September 26, 2011) as an illustration for Anthony Lane's "Road Kill."

Arthur Penn (September 27, 1922 - September 28, 2010)

This is my tribute to Arthur Penn, director of the landmark movie “Bonnie and Clyde,” who died September 28, 2010. I first saw “Bonnie and Clyde” when I was fourteen. It was 1967; my father and I went to see it at the old Kent Theatre in Saint John, N.B. It was my first encounter with an art film, although I didn't think of it that way at the time. All I knew, leaving the theatre that night, was that I’d seen something astonishing – not just the violence, which is what everyone was talking about, but the slow-motion ending and the acting, yes, above all the acting, particularly the performances of the supporting cast: Gene Hackman, Estelle Parsons, Michael J. Pollard, and Gene Wilder. Going into that movie, if you’d asked me to name a movie director, any movie director, about the only one I might’ve come up with is Alfred Hitchcock. But leaving the Kent that long-ago evening (this is sounding more and more like nostalgia, I realize, but when you reach my age, what isn’t nostalgia?), I’d learned the name of another director, a name that I would never forget: Arthur Penn. For me the idea of a director’s movie begins with Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde.” His later pictures don’t come close to achieving “Bonnie and Clyde” ’s impact; there’s a great dropping off. But that’s irrelevant. Penn lives in one work, “Bonnie and Clyde”, and it is, as Pauline Kael says, “a work of art.” My encounter with it initiated me into the world of movies; for the next twenty years, I was a movie obsessive. The New Yorker has published two wonderful pieces about “Bonnie and Clyde”: Kael’s magnificent defence of it, entitled “Bonnie and Clyde” (October 21, 1967; included in her collections “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” and “For Keeps”) and Louis Menand’s excellent “Paris, Texas” (February 17 & 24, 2003), which traces the French New Wave sources of the movie. Rereading these two great essays provides the pleasure of recalling the excitement of seeing "Bonnie and Clyde" for the first time. They remind me, too, of the genius of the man who directed it.