JONATHAN BAUMBACH
449
Sting
and
Waldo Pepper)
for the cool elegances of Alain Resnais's
Stavisky
and Terrence Malick's
Badlands
(preferring to
Badlands
the
trashy
Sugarland Express,
an odd though telling insistence), for the
decadences of Visconti's
Ludwig
(though she is no fan of the great early
works either), for the dry comedy of Tati's
Traffic
and more signifi–
cantly, for the work of Chabrol (ignored in this volume) and Losey and
Antonioni (although not reviewed here, cited as examples of style
divorced from substance. Interestingly, years back when Kael was
doing movie reviews over KPFA radio in Berkeley, she was one of the
first American critics to herald
L 'Avventura.)
On the evidence, Kael
prefers the hot to the cool, gut experience to intellectual, subject matter
to
form; she is a moralist, has a liberal journalist'S respect for impor–
tant social content (is a sucker for good causes like
Serpico
and
Conrack
and
Sounder
and
State of Siege),
is wary of easy sentiment, is
moved by the star turns of charismatic performers, gives more weight to
the sound of a film (clever dialogue gets high marks) than its look,
distrusts visual elegance (and beauty, one might add) almost as if it
were a species of fraud , as if there were something decadent or anti–
human in esthetic suasion.
Although reviewed on the front page of
The New York Times–
what stronger claim to a book's
importance?-Reeling
is essentially a
non-book, a collection of occasional pieces (except for one longer more
thoughtful essay on the culture) which have lost their occasion. Not
many of the films reviewed here in the charged moment of their release,
over-praised or damned or given even-handed justice, still seem worthy
of the passion Kael invests in them. Even the much admired
Nashville
("the funniest epic vision of America ever to reach the screen"),
reviewed by Kael from a rough cut months before its release, seems less
and less like a masterpiece, or even a significant work of art, as the
impact of its immediacy diminishes. One concedes Altman's consider–
able talent. In a fallow time, he is arguably one of the two or three most
interesting directors currently working in American cinema. His films,
of which
Nashville
is the most obviously ambitious, have a characteris–
tic and by now easily recognizable eccentricity, a manic off-beat rhythm
that suggests nothing happening in a great hurry, a frenetic world
caught unawares by a documentary camera. Controlled hysteria is the
director's mode. The subliminal signs say, "the world is coming to an
end," but what a painful good time it is getting there.
Nashville
is an
exhilarating entertainment with self-insistent claims to larger
importance-full of the kind of pretensions Kael would excoriate in a
less sympathetic filmmaker.
