image via Stop Smiling.

“I’ve been struggling to try to do a memoir,” said Andrew Sarris at the beginning of the Moving Image Institute session with he and fellow critic/wife Molly Haskell. “I haven’t made much progress, so don’t hold your breath.” Not to brag, but anyone who was in that room won’t have to. The Haskell/Sarris Hour (actually, several hours––the discussion continued over dinner, including wine for many of us and a vodka tonic for Sarris) was, for me, both the most purely pleasurable session of the Institute, and the portion of the program that gave me the strongest dose of film cultural-historical education. It all came down through Andrew and Molly’s candid storytelling. MOMI’s David Schwartz more than once credited Sarris for having mastered the lecture-as-stand up comedy, but in our small group, with Haskell at his side snarkily finishing sentences, it felt more like lecture-as-autobiography. With jokes.

Haskell (elegant but not showy with her casual Southern glamour) and Sarris (older, physically frail-seeming but mentally sharp) won us over by working as a team. The stories they told must be part of a standard act by now, but there’s a grace with which they go through the motions together that’s utterly charming. Usually, it’s Sarris setting up the punchline for Haskell, such as when Andrew pronounced Ebert “Eee-bear,” and Haskell quipped, “Roe-jay? The French critic?” Or, even better, as when he described receiving his first phone call from Pauline Kael:

Sarris: “I had never seen her. I thought she was a babe. [Pause] Because I hadn’t seen her.

Haskell: “She never had that impression of you, Andrew.”

In fact, on the subject of Kael, Haskell and Sarris have their lines on their famous rival down to a perfectly-timed routine. At one point in the afternoon, Haskell began to digress from her thoughts on the roles for older women in Hollywood, to the role stamped on Hillary Clinton. Sarris broke in: “I want to say one kind thing about Pauline Kael…” Molly cut her husband off. “Speaking about non-sexual women…”

It may be no surprise that an overture of “kindness” from Sarris to Kael would be paired with a slice of snark from his personal and professional partner in crime. In talking about Kael, Haskell and Sarris seem graciously resigned to the fact that their legacies are, for better or for worse, tied to that non-sexual woman who caused them so much grief, although they maintain their entwined fates have nothing to do with their efforts. “In a funny way, we knew Pauline and Andrew had this thing,” Haskell said, “But it was her acolytes who kept it going, who had a hard time letting it go.”

And what was that one kind thing? “The one lasting contribution she made to criticism,” Sarris said, “Is that she gave a licence to all critics, male and female, to say that something turned them on.”

Haskell nodded her head vigorously at that statement, but unfortunately, she’s not finding much in modern movies to be attracted to. Although both Molly and Andrew were fans of Juno, Haskell says she’s “distressed” by the fact that conversations about women have, over the past twenty years, fallen out of mainstream film discourse. “Now it’s like Feminism is a dirty word,” she said. “I think Hollywood has just gone over to the adolescent male, in terms of both behind and in front of the camera. I think a lot of the violence in the world now is about the threat to male supremacy. And this leads to the Apatow thing…it’s a retreat.”

Forgetting Sarah Marshall as smokescreen for a male regression fantasy knee-jerked into motion by endless war? It’s the exact sort of critical thinking about mainstream culture that isn’t happening on any kind of wide scale, much to our chagrin. At dinner, some of us most depressed by the seeming futility of fostering a mass movement of cinephilia or serious cultural appreciation asked Molly to tell us all about the good ol’ days. Everyone wore berets and was impossibly beautiful, and you all used to meet up in Paris and hang out in cafes and talk about movies all night long, right? “No!” Haskell laughed. “It wasn’t like that at all!” But surely, when Sarris and Kael bumped into each other at a party, the entire crowd would split, taking sides West Side Story style to prepare for the dialectical rumble? Haskell says the old nemeses did see each other around, but the antagonism was both less dramatic and more sly. “I invited Pauline to our wedding,” Haskell said, “And she wrote me back, ‘I’ll come to your next one.’” Luckily, that opportunity never came up.