How intriguing to hear that Quentin Tarantino’s new film is going to be about a film critic – the news has sent all of us in the film-critic community into a nervy tizzy of pre-emptive gags and warily dismissive tweets about what this means for the discourse. And The Movie Critic (a working title?) is reportedly to be Tarantino’s final film, his signoff. It’s no surprise that this fanatically encyclopaedic cinephile wanted this film to be set within the film world – but it’s not about a movie actor or a movie producer or a movie director, but a movie critic, surely a hilariously marginal, impotent and parasitical figure, who deserves no more than a walk-on part at best?
Well, the word is that this isn’t just any old film critic, but one based on the most famous film critic of all – Pauline Kael, the New Yorker’s legendary star. If true, it means that Tarantino faces the male-gaze challenge of creating a film around a woman who isn’t sexualised in any way, an intellectual blackbelt who saw off condescension from entitled men, like rival critic Andrew Sarris with whom she clashed on the ostensible issue of auteurism, but also, she suspected, the issue of men having a hard time debating a woman. Pauline Kael isn’t going to be putting her bare feet up on the car dashboard in this film. At least I don’t think so.
It’s important to realise that Tarantino loves critics. No, really. He’s on the record as hero-worshipping Kael, and has already put a fictional film critic in one of his films, and not the usual spiteful nerd, but a real hombre, played by one of the sexiest alpha males in the movie world. In his war picture Inglourious Basterds (2009), Michael Fassbender was Lt Archie Hicox, a commando and man of action, stylish, elegant – and a film critic in civilian life. It wasn’t ironic; he didn’t start criticising what everyone else was doing. He was a player.
Tarantino loves critics, I think, as a connoisseur of the little-known, little-acknowledged galaxy of names who operate behind or beyond the more dazzling lights of the creatives. He did not start out as a critic, like François Truffaut or Paul Schrader, but as a superfan who knew all about critics in the same way he knew all about obscure supporting actors. And in his new book Cinema Speculation he makes a passionate and entirely admirable case for critics who actively champion genre films that would otherwise be ignored and for this reason he loves the LA Times’s Kevin Thomas, the longest-running film critic in US newspapers. Even now, I wonder if Tarantino’s new film is not about Kael – but Thomas.
But here’s the thing. If Kael is the heroine, then I think I can take a guess at what The Movie Critic is about – in fact, I have myself shyly suggested a certain episode in Pauline Kael’s life for dramatisation: in 1979, Warren Beatty made Kael an offer – to come and effectively work for him, producing a film called Love and Money, scripted by Beatty’s friend James Toback. It was a challenge: could Kael actually do something in the movies as opposed to just carping from the sidelines? Kael accepted, and took a leave of absence from the New Yorker. But the project never got off the ground. Kael found herself in an office on the Paramount lot, doing nothing, before going back to the New Yorker, frustrated and sheepish. Had she learned a hard lesson about how slow and agonising it was actually making a film, as opposed to rattling off a witty essay about one? Or did Beatty just want to take Kael down a peg or two?
I once suggested that this could form the basis of a drama of Jamesian subtlety. And Tarantino doesn’t do Jamesian subtlety (although Cinema Speculation has a chapter on Peter Bogdanovich’s 1974 drama Daisy Miller). But it could be that there is a thrilling face-off between Kael and Beatty. Either way, The Movie Critic is going to be the most intensely reviewed film of the decade.
