Instead, I read his piece to portray a genuine moment of connection between the two of them. He says, “Glad to hear it,” when she says she’ll never write another review–and she hears him! She smiles at him! She understands that he’s saying, “I know you don’t like my movie.” Is he being callow? Kael doesn’t seem to think so. She hears him say, honestly, “I’m glad that I don’t have to suffer the embarrassment of having your sharp criticism of my movie aired in public.” This lady, who has suffered a million angry reactions from directors before, smiles, and chooses to sit down and talk some more with him. Perhaps she’s relieved to not have to eviscerate his movie in public, too, given that she seems genuinely unsure of what to make of it. But the worth of the story is that connection they can still have, even after they disagree about the movie.

One last note: reading revenge into Anderson’s description of her infirmities seems even less defensible given Kael’s own attitude towards them. “How are you,” he asks. “Old.” She seems pretty tough. Now, whether she would have wanted this published in the Times is another question. He may well have been rude in doing so. But he wasn’t seeking revenge or to make sport.

Well, not exactly. I did, however, realize that judging Anderson’s original Times article alongside filmmaker’s responses to Kael in her heyday was flat-out dumb.

Pauline Kael once wielded astonishing power over filmmakers and films. Thumps up (so to speak) for Bertolucci. Thumbs down for Cassavetes.

By the time Anderson was poised for his chance, those days were gone, and Anderson knew it. I now wonder, What was it he sought in publishing an account of his dispiriting visit? And I find it hard to see more than a self-aggrandizing attempt to salvage an effort that he might well have known in the first place would prove a disappointment.

and his review of Rushmore – I don’t think he liked it…

David Edelstein’s letter to the New York Times:

Anderson’s response had enough half-truths and distortions to warrant a reply in this column. Let’s look at his assertions line by line:

I sent a copy of my article to Pauline Kael before it was published because I didn’t want to refer to her Parkinson’s without her permission. I told her I wouldn’t publish the story if she didn’t want me to.

According to Kael, she said it was OK to publish the story as part of the introduction to the Rushmore script: Printed screenplays generally have runs of no more than a few thousand copies and are largely read by buffs and wannabe screenwriters. But she didn’t know that Anderson’s account would appear in the New York Times until the day the paper landed on her doorstep–and if she had known, she told me, she’d have screamed.

She read the piece and thanked me for dedicating our script to her.

According to Kael, she first learned she was the dedicatee of the Rushmore script when she read Anderson’s reply to my letter in last Sunday’s Times.

She also suggested some grammatical changes and asked me to correct a few details, which I did.

She asked that Anderson note that her recollection of the events in question was quite different–which he didn’t.

The suggestion that I wanted “to make sport” of Ms. Kael’s infirmities causes me great pain and embarrassment.

So much pain and embarrassment that a few nights ago he was telling the story all over again on national television to Tom Snyder. Anderson’s encounter with the retired New Yorker critic has now become comic fodder for his autobiography. How long before it turns up in a movie?

I thought it was clear in my article that I not only deeply respect Ms. Kael but that I very much enjoyed meeting with her.

I like Ken Tucker’s description of the piece in a recent appreciation of Kael in Salon: “putatively affectionate but peculiarly heartless.” Like the obnoxious hero of Rushmore, Max Fischer, Anderson has trouble seeing much beyond the bubble of his narcissism.

Boy, could I relate to Wes Anderson’s ”My Private Screening with Pauline Kael” [Jan. 31] about traveling to the Berkshires to show his film ”Rushmore” to the retired New Yorker critic. Here’s a young guy who adored Ms. Kael’s work all his life, learned how to watch movies from it and dreamed of screening for her his own film. Doubtless the response he’d hoped for was along the lines of: ”You’re a genius. You’ve revolutionized filmmaking. You’ve captured the adolescent experience as no one has before.”

What a bummer it must have been to find Ms. Kael somewhat hobbled by Parkinson’s disease. And then, when she gently implied that she didn’t think the picture added up to much, how devastating. Here’s the thing, though. A person with even an trace of decency would not have turned around and written up the encounter in a way designed to make sport of her infirmities. I hope that if Mr. Anderson is ever on the kind of mind-altering medications that advanced Parkinson’s and meningitis sufferers find it necessary to take simply to function, someone doesn’t visit his home and then surprise him with an account of what he said and did in a major newspaper.

DAVID EDELSTEIN
Brooklyn

The writer is the film critic for Slate, the Internet magazine.

Wes Anderson replies:
I sent a copy of my article to Pauline Kael before it was published because I didn’t want to refer to her Parkinson’s without her permission. I told her I wouldn’t publish the story if she didn’t want me to. She read the piece and thanked me for dedicating our script to her. (The article will appear as the introduction to the published screenplay of ”Rushmore.”) She also suggested some grammatical changes and asked me to correct a few details, which I did. The suggestion that I wanted ”to make sport” of Ms. Kael’s infirmities causes me great pain and embarrassment. I thought it was clear in my article that I not only deeply respect Ms. Kael but that I very much enjoyed meeting with her.