Woman, released in the fall of 1988, he demonstrated that his fascination with the remoteness and emotional aridity of Manhattan intellectuals and artists hadn’t receded—or developed. Gena Rowlands played a cold philosophy professor who rents an apartment for the purpose of writing a book; she is distracted by the next-door conversations, through the vent, of a therapist and her patients—one patient in particular, a coming-unglued pregnant woman (Mia Farrow). The professor becomes obsessed with the woman, who gradually leads her to confront the things in life she has missed. The professor was a distant cousin to Geraldine Page’s perfection-obsessed mother in Interiors. But by now, Allen had worn down his concern for these characters to the point where the grooves were off them; his insights now seemed the kind that ’70s college students would come up with after a few hits on the bong. Pauline put it succinctly: “Woody Allen’s picture is meant to be about emotion, but it has no emotion. It’s smooth and high-toned; it’s polished in its nothingness.”
As always, she preferred off-center comedy to message drama that took itself too seriously. She was intoxicated by Pedro Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, a comedy about sexual chaos in modern Madrid, painted in bold strokes and Day-Glo colors. It was a daring comedy, “a hallucinogenic Feydeau play,” as Pauline described it, and she thought that Almodóvar seemed like “Godard with a human face—a happy face.” But she disliked Barry Levinson’s Rain Man, a story of the relationship between a two-bit bum named Charlie (Tom Cruise) and his brilliant, autistic brother Raymond (Dustin Hoffman). Pauline acknowledged the wit in Hoffman’s performance, but she thought it had “nowhere to go. It becomes a repetitive, boring feat, though the boringness can be construed as fidelity to the role (and masochists can regard it as great acting).” She thought that in Hoffman’s “mind’s eye he’s always watching the audience watch him.” She regarded Tom Cruise as “an actor in the same sense that Robert Taylor was an actor. He’s patented: his knowing that a camera is on him produces nothing but fraudulence.” For dismissing Rain Man as “wet kitsch,” she was flooded with letters accusing her of bigotry toward autistic people.
In the spring of 1989 Dutton published Pauline’s latest collection of reviews, Hooked, covering the period of July 1985 to June 1988, for which she had received an advance of $17,500, with Billy Abrahams once again her editor. Publishers Weekly complained, “A disquieting note . . . is the insensitive review of the Holocaust documentary Shoah,” but admitted that “on the whole, Kael’s genuine excitement about film sustains the book.” Hooked sold in the neighborhood of 13,250 net copies in hardcover and 1,650 in paperback.
Blockbuster movies had risen to a position of unprecedented dominance in the film market, and the big one of the summer of 1989 was Tim Burton’s Batman. Pauline loved the thirty-year-old director’s “macabre sensibility, with a cheerfulness that’s infectious,” and she thought that “this powerfully glamorous new Batman, with sets angled and lighted like film noir, goes beyond pulp; it gallops into the cocky unknown.” When a big special-effects-driven picture was executed this well, Pauline did not object to its possibly dwarfing worthy smaller pictures.
For some time a definite weariness seemed to be coloring Pauline’s weekly reviewing. She hadn’t written a truly surprising, expansive, out-on-the-ledge review since the Shoah controversy three years earlier. In her review of Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War, however, she regained some of her old vitality. It was a movie that allowed her to make the most profound emotional connection she had made in years; despite the marked difference in subject matter, Casualties of War might be considered her Shoeshine of the late ’80s. (She even referenced the De Sica film in the first paragraph of her review of the De Palma.) Based on a horrific crime that had taken place in Vietnam in 1966, Casualties of War depicted a group of American G.I.s who get brutally ambushed by Vietcong. When one of them is killed, their sergeant (Sean Penn) snaps, and hatches a plan to retaliate by abducting a Vietnamese girl and raping her. Casualties of War provided Pauline with an opportunity to go into her long-abandoned confessional mode:We in the audience are put in the man’s position: we’re made to feel the awfulness of being ineffectual. This lifelike defeat is central to the movie. (One hot day on my first trip to New York City, I walked past