McCabe and Mrs. Kael
Esquire, January, 2002 by Tom Carson
IT WAS JUST OVER a quarter century ago that Robert Altman made "the ultimate Altman movie"--one the late Pauline Kael saw fit, no kidding, to compare to Joyce's Ulysses. What stuck in some people's craws was that her "review" was blatant special pleading-or special bullying, since she was using her New Yorker pulpit to flack for Nashville before she or anyone knew whether it would even reach theaters. It did, of course, and ever since, I've been finding Altman's carnival a useful test of intellectual simpatico. Whenever someone informs me that this crammed but flimsy swath of dim-bulb Americana is a masterpiece, I can feel the conversation sink like a torpedoed ocean liner, because for me its glib contempt for people was the beginning of disillusionment.
At the time, I was...
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