more significant than the results onscreen.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Pauline’s physical condition worsened at a faster rate than she and her doctors had anticipated. Although it was not yet preventing her from keeping up her regular reviewing duties, the task of writing was becoming more and more arduous; she found that the words didn’t pour out of her at the rate they once had. There was no ignoring the fact that the Parkinson’s was affecting her memory; she would start to call a longtime friend or acquaintance, but the name wouldn’t surface. She had always had an excellent memory—for details, for facts, for entire scenes and stretches of dialogue in movies that she hadn’t seen for decades—and more and more she would have to rely on the fact-checkers at The New Yorker to back her up on certain details in a movie review. (Fortunately, it was part of the checkers’ job to go to the movies and take notes, a policy that had been instituted years earlier as a method of dealing with Penelope Gilliatt’s lapses.)
One night in 1990 Pauline sat through a screening of Penny Marshall’s Awakenings, based on Oliver Sacks’s book about treating comatose patients with the drug L-dopa. While it was difficult for her to watch the film, given her struggles to become accustomed to life with Parkinson’s, still, she didn’t go soft on the movie, which she considered a betrayal of the most compelling aspects of its source.
To make matters worse, she was saddened by most of the movies that were being released. She was not taken in by Michael Moore’s Roger & Me, a documentary about the economic devastation in the wake of the closing of eleven General Motors plants in Flint, Michigan. Audiences responded enthusiastically to Moore’s muckraking spirit and were eager to hail him as a new truth-teller and counterculture hero, but Pauline found the film shockingly mean-spirited; she hated the way Moore scored cheap laughs off the poor people of Flint who were simply trying to get by any way they could. “The picture is like the work of a slick ad exec,” she wrote. “It does something that is humanly very offensive: Roger & Me uses its leftism as a superior attitude.”
There were, unfortunately, signs of her fatigue showing up on the pages of The New Yorker. She liked Stephen Frears’s The Grifters, based on Jim Thompson’s book about a trio of con artists, but she wasn’t quite able to convey the movie’s pulse and originality in her review. She also liked Martin Scorsese’s latest, Goodfellas, and while she thought the film missed greatness because Scorsese and his scriptwriter, Nicholas Pileggi (who adapted his own book), hadn’t shaped the material, she acknowledged that “the moviemaking has such bravura that you respond as if you were at a live performance.”
She took aim at one of the year’s biggest, Dances with Wolves, the drama about a Civil War soldier who befriends the Sioux and eventually becomes a tribal member. “There’s nothing affected about Costner’s acting or directing,” she wrote. “You hear his laid-back, surfer accent; you see his deliberate goofy faints and falls, and all the close-ups of his handsomeness. This epic was made by a bland megalomaniac. (The Indians should have named him Plays with Camera.) You look at that untroubled face and know he can make everything lightweight.”
In December she made the very last of her lost-cause pitches, this time for Karel Reisz’s Everybody Wins, with Debra Winger as a flaked-out hooker involved in a mystery in a small New England town. The movie was sneaked into release early in 1990 and bombed, but now, nearly a year later, Pauline exhorted her readers to catch it on VHS. She had a touching observation about the fate of Everybody Wins that indicated the depths of her discouragement: “For a brief period in the late sixties and early seventies, moviegoers seemed willing to be guided through a movie by their intuition and imagination; if this slyly funny picture about the spread of corruption had been released then, it might have been considered a minor classic.”
It was that period that she hoped, against all evidence to the contrary, might somehow be resuscitated in some form or another. But what had happened to the movies went far beyond the blockbuster mentality and the studio’s obsession with repeated formulas and marketing strategies. The past decade had seen a steady erosion of the pride of place in the culture that movies had once held. A great deal of that development