Two big
stories relating to film critics are once again bringing up questions about the
role of film criticism today. Because the world needs another piece on the state of film criticism, I found this a most dire subject to write on, though I
think one story highlights the other, so bear with me. The two stories
individually have been getting a lot of notoriety, one for its complete idiocy
and the other for its idealistic advocacy. I’ll start with the more banal story
first.
If you
picked up a New Yorker yesterday and
flipped to the movie section, you may have read David Denby’s review of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the
highly anticipated adaptation of the Stieg Larson novel from Social Network director David Fincher
and produced by Scott Rudin. In publishing the review, however, Denby broke
perhaps the one big rule film critics have to follow: don’t publish your
reviews until the studio says so, a so-called “embargo.” A series of emails,
published by The Playlist, follow the back and forth between Denby and Rudin, which highlight the triviality on both sides.
To be
frank, the whole thing feels like a schoolyard dick-measuring contest. But Rudin’s point to Denby that the film “has been badly damaged” by the early
review is something to really scoff at. When you have a huge blockbuster like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, one knows
people are going to go to it, whether or not reviews are good. How many teenage
girls decided to skip out on Twilight:
Breaking Dawn because David Edelstein gave it a middling review? Embargos
on films let studios control the press on their films to give it the most
exposure, but when it comes to a film that is going to be plastered on
billboards everywhere, Rudin’s anger seems misplaced.
However,
that doesn’t mean film critics don’t have their place, which brings me to the
story of Margaret, Kenneth Lonergan’s
ambitious masterpiece that came and went without much notice when released in
September. Because of the film’s legal troubles, the distributor, Fox
Searchlight more or less dumped the film, while the few major trades that did
review somewhat dismissed it. But soon, other critics—Ben Keningsberg, Alison Wilmore, Matt Singer, Richard Brody, and Glenn Kenny, among
others—caught up with it during its release and herald it a masterpiece, or at
least something of merit worth more than two weeks and little advertizing. I
managed to catch up with it during the second-to-last day of its theatrical
release and went particularly over the moon as well.
As Margaret disappeared from existence,
however, #teammargaret, a Twitter hashtag to fight for the film’s existence was
born. The whole thing played like an inside joke for film critics until last
week, on the eve of the film’s UK release. With raves coming from London film
critics, including a pair of five star reviews from The Guardian and The Telegraph, Slant film critic
Jamie Christley launched a petition to Fox Searchlight to get the film back in
discussion by making the film accessible for critics for their end-of-year
awards. While that doesn’t necessarily help people who don’t get press invites,
the wave of buzz led to staggering numbers in the United Kingdom--The Guardian reports a weekend gross of
£4,595 ($7,170). “That number gave Margaret
the highest screen average of any film on release, by some margin. This,
despite the film only receiving one evening showtime per day (at 8pm), due to
its hefty duration of 150 minutes.” Next weekend, Searchlight has decided to
expand the film to ten screens in the UK, which rivals the entire number of screens it played in the United States.
