With the advent of her centenary, What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael is a perfect opportunity to get reacquainted with the contentious film critic’s pervasive work. The documentary offers an enjoyable overview of an extensive career, engaging in her successes and losses, but glimpses over her meatier conflicts.
Pauline Kael was one of America’s most influential film critics, working at The New Yorker for over twenty years. Often vitriolic, always insightful, as a female film critic with assertive opinions, she was easily distinguishable from the intellectualism of her male peers. Rob Garver’s documentary is an affectionate tribute to a writer whose work continues to inspire and polarise readers to this day.
One enjoyable aspect is the inclusion of her reviews, narrated by Sarah Jessica Parker, played over various classic moments of American cinema. Her lambaste of The Sound of Music read over images of smiling Von Trapp children and a guitar-wielding Julie Andrews is a humorous highlight. The documentary delights in oscillating between films she praised and ones she slated. This keeps an audience unfamiliar with Kael’s work enjoyably on their toes.
It would have been interesting to gain more insight into some of the meatier areas of Kael’s career which largely remain unpacked. Her public and personal attack on film critic Andrew Sarris, or Renata Adler’s scathing review of her sixth collection of film reviews ‘When the Lights Go Down’, are fascinating disputes that are glossed over to maintain the documentaries buoyant tone.
With the likes of Quentin Tarantino, John Boorman and Paul Shrader, the talking-head interviews, with the exception of Lili Anolik, present a striking absence of female voices. Overall, though, Garver’s film is a congenial ode to a unique and important cultural voice of the 20th century.
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