Pauline Kael, longer

“In repose, Lily Tomlin looks like a wistful pony; when she grins, her equine gums and long, drawn face suggest a friendly, goofy horse. Either way, she takes the camera and holds it for al long as she wants to, with the assurance of a star. On TV, when she does one of her characters--such as the squincy-eyed five-and-a-half-year-old Edith Ann, sitting sly and lonely in a big chair--you feel that she is creating this character out of the possibilities in herself. She can make you respond the same way in a movie role conceive by others. In Nashville, she played a sane woman who knew what mattered to her, and each time that she had a scene she brought calm into the movie. As Margo in the new detective film The Late Show … everything she does is a little off center. Margo is a nervous talker; her perceptions are faster than her ability to process them, and her conversation is a humming sound that she barely hears. Margo came to L.A. to be an actress, and she still has ties to show business--she's trying to manage some performers. She's also trying to start a dress-designing business, while hanging on by dealing a little grass and transporting stolen goods. That's how she gets into the trouble the movie is about: she keeps five hundred dollars that doesn't belong to her, and the hoods she's working for take her cat, threatening to strangle it unless she pays up. At first, Margo doesn't seem very smart, or particularly likable. But then she's so exhilarated by her prowess at driving a van away from a pursuing car that she cackles in triumph and begins to fantasize a whole new life for herself, and we see the gleam as she realizes that Ira Wells (Art Carney), the old private investigator who has been trying to find her cat, may be overweight and out of condition but he's different from the other men she knows. An instant later, she suggests that they could become a team like Nick and Nora Charles. Without any encouragement from the embarrassed yet pleased senior citizen, she dreams on, higher and higher, and her euphoria is openhearted. Lily Tomlin has the magical timing to do this dizzy, difficult scene in character and make it seem totally unrehearsed. If anyone else were playing Margo, she might be a mere kook; Tomlin makes her a genuine eccentric--she isn't just the heroine, she's the picture's comic muse.”

Pauline Kael
The New Yorker, February 7, 1977
When the Lights Go Down, p.?

(The date on this post is rather arbitrary, set so as to place it within the blog.  I believe I did originally post it in 2005, however.)