What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael

Directed by Rob Garver, What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael explores the life and legacy of famed movie critic Pauline Kael – with the movie charting her early days as a film programmer through to her heyday as an influential reviewer to her eventual short-lived stint as a Hollywood producer. Filmmaker Garver delivers a briskly-paced documentary that ultimately stands as a fine primer into Kael’s still-relevant body of work, with the picture benefiting from its interviews with such compelling subjects as Paul Schrader, Stephanie Zacharek, and David O. Russell. It’s clear, though, that What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael‘s success is due mostly to its recurring emphasis on fascinating anecdotes relating to Kael’s career, including an engrossing passage detailing her controversial opposition to auteur theory, and there’s little doubt, as well, that Garver does a nice job of eliciting sparse yet intriguing tidbits about his subject’s personal life (with, for example, a fair amount of time spent on Kael’s close relationship with her daughter). Despite its raft of appealing attributes, however, What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael‘s somewhat superficial approach ultimately does prevent it from becoming the stellar true-life portrait one might’ve anticipated and hoped for (ie it is, when all’s said and done, the cinematic equivalent to reading Kael’s Wikipedia page) – with the end result an entertaining documentary that could (and should) have been much better.

*** out of ****