Rob Garver's film tries to salvage what he can of Pauline Kael's writing career, from her mocking of Chaplin's Limelight in 1953 to her comparison of Last Tango in Paris in 1972 to the premiere of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps and her book Raising Kane, which was full of factual errors and uncredited research from UCLA's Howard Suber. In 1980 Renata Adler skewered Kael's book When the Lights Go Down in the New York Review of Books as "worthless," pointing out her bullying and the use of the totalitarian "we."
The film is full of talking heads: directors she championed loved her while those she criticized hated her. She gathered around her a number of acolytes who were called "Paulettes" and if they agreed with her views she would promote them for jobs as film critics. Her prose style is as dated as the films of the directors she praised when she was a critic at The New Yorker from 1968 to 1991: DePalma, Peckinpah, Scorsese and Coppola. Her knowledge of film history was sketchy at best and she preferred violence and sex to intelligence and perception, though she did occasionally praise Godard, without apparently realizing how indebted he was to directors she intensely disliked, including Hawks, Hitchcock and John Ford.
Brian Kellow's biography, Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark (2011; I'm not sure if the irony of the title was intended) captures Kael's life in all its contradictions and conflicts of interest, including her brief, short-lived and disastrous detour to work at filmmaking with Warren Beatty. If I had to guess why so many people seemed to like her "criticism" I would say it was because she posited herself as the most articulate member of the audience, therefore those who agreed with her had a ready answer if they were asked why they liked a particular film. This is not everyone's idea of what a "critic" should be; my own view is that good criticism enables one to learn and think for oneself.
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