Pauline Kael died Monday afternoon at the age of 82, a decade after she wrote the last of more than 600 columns for the New Yorker and 34 years after she changed the face of movie criticism. Her long treatise on Bonnie and Clyde — the second essay she published in the magazine — approached Arthur Penn’s film as simultaneously a popular masterwork, a new chapter in movie history, and a reflection of a raw and vivid popular culture. No one who had written about motion pictures, not even the great James Agee (whom Kael admired), had ever provided so multifaceted a vision of what movies are and what they can be. No critic had ever brought the world outside the movie house — the world that, more than ever before, was being reflected in the latest pictures — into the reviewing process with such a depth of understanding. And no critic had ever employed so loose-jointed and colloquial a style to express so immense an acquaintance with the arts — all the arts. Reading her regularly in the New Yorker (her column became weekly, for six months of the year, in 1968; when she returned in 1980 from a year’s hiatus in Hollywood, it became bimonthly but appeared the whole year round), you were almost as likely to meet allusions to novelists, playwrights, and painters as to directors, screenwriters, and actors. She saw Taxi Driver in terms of Dostoyevsky; she compared Carroll Ballard’s use of color in The Black Stallion to Morris Louis canvases.

It was a combination of her casual broadness of expertise, her loathing of stodgy writing, and her utter independence of thought that made her such a dynamic and controversial figure. As a critic, she didn’t have a single predigested opinion. She refused to like a movie or a book because schoolteachers or scholars had told her she was supposed to, and she refused to dislike one because it was hip to do so. Her impatience with the auteur critics she famously took on in her early, pre–New Yorker essay " Circles and Squares " was based on the way they defended the directors they loved no matter what those directors put their names to; such dogged fidelity, she suggested, was like admiring a piece of clothing because of its label. She could stand up for an unorthodox picture like Marguerite Duras’s The Truck for its freshness and inventiveness or a piece of old-fashioned entertainment like Fiddler on the Roof for its beauty and emotional power. She was endlessly exasperating to film theorists because she took every movie as it came rather than trying to make it fit into a vise. She drove publicists crazy because they could never predict what she was going to like.

I started reading her as an undergraduate, the year she initiated her weekly column, and I devoured her reviews, including the disparate pieces that appeared in her first two books, I Lost It at the Movies and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. (The first of many collections of her New Yorker reviews was published under the title Going Steady. All her subsequent books were reprints of her New Yorker writing — except 5001 Nights at the Movies, a dazzling compendium of capsule reviews that included not only items she’d contributed to the magazine’s " Goings On About Town " section but also film notes she’d written in the ’60s when she ran twin art houses in Berkeley, before moving East.) Many years later I became a friend, but like so many of her friends I started out a fan. College acquaintances recall my reading some of her choicest paragraphs out loud in the dorm; certainly I committed many of them to memory. It wasn’t just the prose that blissed me out, though God knows it was deluxe — lustrous and lean, ticklish and keen. " The most visually seductive of directors, a man who can make impotence sexy, " she called Nicolas Roeg in her review of The Man Who Fell to Earth, and of Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon she wrote, " If Irving Thalberg had hired Antonioni to direct Marie Antoinette, it might have come out like this film — grayish powdered wigs and curdled faces. " More than the language, though, it was the way she had of making you think about a movie in a stunningly new way. Her ideas about the movies she saw, especially the ones she adored, nested in your brain.

And in the first seven or eight years of her tenure at the magazine, when movies in general and American movies in particular were responding to the excitement and the horror in the Vietnam-era culture and filmmakers suddenly (and all too briefly) enjoyed the freedom to articulate highly personal visions of what they found there, many movies thrilled her. (Most of them are covered in her books Deeper into Movies and Reeling.) She wrote of Robert Altman’s adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, " Altman, who probably works closer to his unconscious than any other American director, tells a detective story ... but he does it through a spree — a high-flying rap on Chandler and the movies and that Los Angeles sickness. " Rhapsodizing on Satyajit Ray’s Days and Nights in the Forest, she theorized that " our involvement with his characters is so direct that we are caught up in a blend of the fully accessible and the inexplicable, the redolent, the mysterious. " Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets " is the only movie I’ve ever seen that achieves the effects of Expressionism without the use of distortion. " Bob Fosse’s Cabaret " does not exploit decadence; rather, it gives it its due. " The Francis Ford Coppola of The Godfather, Part II " is the inheritor of the traditions of the novel, the theater, and — especially — opera and movies. " In her famous review of Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris with Marlon Brando, she wrote that the film achieves " realism with the terror of actual experience still alive on the screen. "

Her resoluteness about the virtues of movies that other critics and the initial audiences tended to ignore probably infuriated more people than her dismissal of popular hits like The Sting and art-house darlings like Amadeus. Yet her impassioned celebration of Altman, Bertolucci, Scorsese, De Palma, and the Taviani brothers, among many other filmmakers, helped forge their careers as surely as her pre–New Yorker reviews had contributed to the careers of Godard and Truffaut. And she continued to care about filmmakers of talent long after she’d stopped writing, which is why some of them continued to send copies of their work up to her home in the Berkshires. For her last birthday I brought her a DVD of The Lost Son, the latest picture by Chris Menges, an English director we both admired, which never received an American release. After she’d viewed it, she called me up to talk about how brilliant she thought it was, and to fret over the way Menges has been neglected. " What can we do for him? " she asked, her sense of a critic’s mission unblunted by 10 years of retirement and 20 years with Parkinson’s disease.

The success of movies she despised — movies like American Beauty and Gladiator — depressed her. But no matter how bleak the cinematic landscape looked, she never despaired of it. There always seemed to be something to excite her — Philip Kaufman’s Quills or last season’s two-part opener of The West Wing or Judy Davis’s performance in the title role of the TV mini-series Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows. " The audience one must believe in, " she wrote in 1974, " is the great audience: the audience one was part of as a child, when one first began to respond to great work — the audience one is still part of. " She never gave up her seat in that audience, and in my experience nothing pleased her more than contact with others who were part of it too. During the 24-hour period after she died, most of the e-mail and phone messages I received were from former students of mine who felt compelled to convey some of what they felt reading her had done for them — how it had given voice to their own profound love of movies and helped them understand what it was about movies that was so important to them. I think that would have made her very happy.

Issue Date: September 6 - 13, 2001