The director Pauline Kael never wanted to watch again: “I don’t care if I ever see another one”
Pauline Kael could never be accused of being anything other than her authentic self. The legendary New Yorker critic would praise films she loved to the hilt and blast the ones she didn’t into oblivion. Her opinions often flew the face of her critical contemporaries, but she also fairly regularly contradicted her own verdict on an actor, director, or genre. In fact, one genre was particularly hard for Kael to pin down, and it led to her declaring she never wanted to watch another film by one of its most iconic directors – even though he worked with two of her favourite actors.
Throughout her career, Kael rarely met a tentpole blockbuster that she liked. For example, even though she thought Steven Spielberg’s Jaws was a terrific film in and of itself, she accused it of having a terrible effect on the movie business because it helped birth movies like Star Wars. Indeed, she once said, “The big picture is almost always the bad picture.”
Interestingly, though, Kael didn’t have a problem with action/adventure movies, as a rule. In fact, she was a big supporter of the early work of the directors Walter Hill and Sam Peckinpah, who almost exclusively dealt in hard-edged, ultra-violent, hyper-masculine movies. She loved Hill’s New York City gang warfare classic The Warriors, as well as Southern Comfort, and gave glowing reviews to every one of Peckinpah’s movies except The Getaway.
However, Kael’s review of one of Peckinpah’s most notorious films, Straw Dogs, was simultaneously positive and scathing. In perhaps one of her greatest backhanded compliments, she tagged that Dustin Hoffman rape revenge drama as “the first American film that is a fascist work of art”. She also levelled this criticism at Dirty Harry, which she called a “right-wing fantasy”, and took great joy in tearing many of Clint Eastwood‘s other action movies apart. As her fellow iconic critic Roger Ebert once noted, Kael “had no theory, no rules, no guidelines, no objective standards. You couldn’t apply her ‘approach’ to a film. With her, it was all personal.”
It all nicely brings us to the 1990s, a decade in which Kael’s difficult-to-predict approach to the action genre shifted again. In an interview with Modern Maturity magazine, she dismissed most of the large-scale action films that Hollywood was making, arguing, “Conglomerate financing means you get big action films. They’re the safest; they travel internationally and work with an illiterate or subliterate audience.” To Kael, these soulless spectacles didn’t have anything to say about the world or culture, and that meant they were ultimately empty vessels.
Perhaps she was wary, then, when she sat down in 1997 to watch the latest explosive action epic from John Woo, the iconic Hong Kong filmmaker who redefined the genre with movies like Hard Boiled and The Killer. After crossing the water to work in Hollywood, Woo landed an incredible double act to star in his third English-language effort: John Travolta and Nicolas Cage.
Interestingly, Travolta and Cage were two of Kael’s favourite actors. In that same interview, she stated that Cage’s presence in The Rock alongside Sean Connery was just about enough to make the movie worth watching. “Nicolas Cage is an unusual actor,” she said, meaning it 100% as a compliment. She added, “Travolta’s heartfelt quality cuts through the falsest material,” which meant she could enjoy him in films she might otherwise have dismissed.
So, it all begged the question: could Face/Off, a preposterous action movie made by one of the genre’s finest directors and starring two of Kael’s top stars, somehow overcome the odds and charm her? The answer, unfortunately, was “Not even close”.
“I expected to love the Cage-Travolta interplay in Face/Off,” Kael admitted, “But it was poorly conceived. I don’t care if I ever see another one by John Woo. I need a vacation from gunshots.”
