The Actress Who Crushed a Critic

B ecause we live in the age of stupid, a period of hair-on-fire hysteria when you can, for instance, lose your job for allowing your thumb and forefinger to meet, I suppose it shouldn’t surprise us that a writer’s job hangs in the balance for the crime of writing something he didn’t write.

Dennis Harvey is a 60-year-old gay man who has written film reviews for Variety for 30 years. Last January he reviewed a Sundance Film Festival offering, Promising Young Woman, that wasn’t put in general release until December. There was nothing particularly noteworthy about his piece, which was somewhat mixed but mostly positive in its analysis of both the film and its star, Carey Mulligan.

Yet Harvey’s career at this moment is in jeopardy because he noted that Mulligan in certain scenes seemed somewhat of an awkward fit for the role. (Mulligan’s character is a former med student who dedicates her life to entrapping men into taking sexual advantage of her by dressing provocatively and pretending to get helplessly drunk in clubs. As I wrote earlier, the movie is a completely ridiculous revenge fantasy dressed up as an important message about misogyny.)

In his review, Harvey called Mulligan a “fine actress” who nevertheless “seems a bit of an odd choice as this admittedly many-layered apparent femme fatale.” Noting that Margot Robbie was one of the film’s producers, he said “one can (perhaps too easily) imagine the role might once have been intended for her. Whereas with this star, Cassie wears her pickup-bait gear like bad drag; even her long blonde hair seems a put-on.”

That’s . . . it? That’s the sentence that imperiled a man’s livelihood? Yes, that’s really it. In the Age of Stupid, these remarks are now “misogynist.” If you haven’t been keeping up, on social media these days, the term no longer refers to hatred of womankind, or hatred of feminine things. Today “misogynist” means simply “someone who said something slightly rude about any female progressives feel attached to.” (You can be as mean as you like about Melania Trump or Kayleigh McEnany or Megyn Kelly; since they’re associated with the Right, nothing you say about them can ever be misogynist.)

Harvey’s career came under review by the social-media mob because Mulligan herself “called out” the review — meaning she professed aggrievement while stomping all over the poor slob who wrote it. The spectacle was as if a very sad and weepy Godzilla put its foot down on Bambi while complaining, “You hurt my feelings.” Actresses are rich, famous, and adored; freelance film critics are . . . not.

Nearly a year after Harvey’s review ran, a New York Times profile published December 23 depicted Mulligan as a trauma survivor for having been subjected to this review. Mulligan has been written about many thousands of times, and if Harvey’s review was the nastiest thing ever said about her, she has probably lived the most charmed life of any performer who ever put on greasepaint. Still, the Times piece said she “winced” when she thought of the Variety review, then proceeded to a dramatic pause during which Mulligan contemplated “whether she really wanted to go there.”

“I read the Variety review, because I’m a weak person,” Mulligan said. “And I took issue with it. It felt like it was basically saying that I wasn’t hot enough to pull off this kind of ruse.” She indicated that she had committed several lines of the review to memory. “It drove me so crazy,” she said. “I was like, ‘Really? For this film, you’re going to write something that is so transparent? Now? In 2020?’ I just couldn’t believe it.”

Since Harvey said nothing about whether Mulligan was “hot enough” for the role, this was a bit baffling, not to mention extremely shabby and petty. Mulligan will likely be waltzing down a red carpet into the Academy Awards ceremony to celebrate the film in a few weeks, while freelance film critics watching the Oscars will be contemplating whether they can afford the upscale brand of pork and beans for supper that evening.

Perhaps intuiting that she sounded a bit hypersensitive, even for an actress, she expanded her critique into one of those society-is-so-horrible-to-women declarations that women living in $3 million country houses seem especially fond of making. Actresses specialize in living within the imagination, and everyone around them specializes in indulging them. So the social-media mob took her side when Mulligan blasted Harvey for saying . . . some more things he didn’t say.

“We don’t allow women to look normal anymore, or like a real person,” Mulligan complained. “Why does every woman who’s ever onscreen have to look like a supermodel? That has shifted into something where the expectation of beauty and perfection onscreen has gotten completely out of control.”

After these comments were published, and social-media hysterics started calling Harvey a misogynist, Variety took a step that has little if any precedent and attached a groveling apology to his review: “Variety sincerely apologizes to Carey Mulligan and regrets the insensitive language and insinuation in our review of Promising Young Woman that minimized her daring performance.” Harvey typically publishes several reviews a month on Variety, but his writing hasn’t appeared there since January 9.

Meanwhile Mulligan continues to blast away at Harvey for saying things he did not say. In a follow-up interview last month, she said, “I think in criticizing or sort of bemoaning a lack of attractiveness on my part in a character, it wasn’t a personal slight . . . but it made me concerned that in such a big publication, an actress’s appearance could be criticized and it could be that, you know, that could be accepted as completely reasonable criticism.”

But what Harvey said actually was completely reasonable criticism. He thought she didn’t look right for the role in some scenes. So what? You wouldn’t cast Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr. Darcy. You wouldn’t cast Chris Pratt as Albert Einstein. And there are some actresses — Meryl Streep comes to mind — you would hesitate to cast as slutty man-bait because they radiate class and intelligence. Mulligan usually plays genteel types, often in period pieces. Harvey must be feeling as stumped as the Latino truck driver who made the “okay” symbol and found himself tarred as a white supremacist.

“I did not say or even mean to imply Mulligan is ‘not hot enough’ for the role,” Harvey told The Guardian, making a point that ought to be obvious to anyone who can read, even a cosseted movie star.

“I’m a 60-year-old gay man. I don’t actually go around dwelling on the comparative hotnesses of young actresses, let alone writing about that,” he added, noting that none of his editors at Variety had anything to say about the piece for eleven months — until Mulligan launched her passive-aggressive attack. The Guardian noted that “his professional fate remains uncertain.”

Harvey said, “It’s left in question whether after 30 years of writing for Variety I will now be sacked because of review content no one found offensive until it became fodder for a viral trend piece.”

So far, Mulligan has publicly expressed no remorse whatsoever for setting fire to a man’s reputation. If she isn’t a horrible person, she’ll reread Harvey’s review, call up Variety, and apologize for creating a fake scandal out of her poor reading comprehension.