Mieux vaut tard que jamais, so bravo to the National Society of Film Critics. Nearly two months after an established film critic for Variety got nuked by a hypersensitive actress, the critics’ group has just issued a robust defense of the critic, Dennis Harvey. Harvey did nothing wrong but his career was nevertheless placed in jeopardy. Harvey’s review, it turns out, was edited by another critic, Peter Debruge, who is a member of the National Society of Film Critics. Harvey isn’t, but if film critics don’t stand for the principle of asserting the right to do criticism, they don’t stand for much. Doing so these days, however, requires courage sufficient to sustain attacks from social-media mobs, and for all of their comparisons of themselves to D-Day troops and firefighters, journalists these days are suffering from a woeful lack of courage. Sonny Bunch noted the other day that only he and I and maybe a couple of other writers had mustered the fortitude to speak out on behalf of an unfairly maligned fellow critic. (I don’t know Harvey, by the way.)

To recap briefly this story, which I covered here: Harvey wrote a review for Variety last January of the movie Promising Young Woman. Nobody found fault with it until late December, at which point its star, Carey Mulligan, interviewed for a New York Times profile, misinterpreted the review and pronounced herself hurt by it. Using a fairly typical technique of the bully who wishes to present as a victim, the actress, who has been written about many thousands of times, claimed to have been wounded by something no one had said in the first place. She asserted that Harvey had criticized her for being “not hot enough” for the part she played in the movie and tied this into longstanding complaints that women are being unfairly judged on their looks. In so doing Mulligan lit a moronic inferno of social-media hot takes.

Variety then took a step with little if any precedent and attached a groveling apology to Harvey’s review. Harvey, a 60-year-old gay man, was shocked to find himself being widely denounced as a “misogynist” and perplexed to find his job hanging in the balance for writing that Mulligan, “a fine actress, seems a bit of an odd choice” for the movie role and that Margot Robbie (one of the film’s producers) might have been a better fit “whereas with this star, Cassie wears her pickup-bait gear like bad drag; even her long blonde hair seems a put-on.”

Now the National Society of Film Critics is properly defending Harvey:

Mulligan, like any artist, is within her rights to respond to criticism of her work, just as we are within our rights to assert that nothing in Harvey’s review — which focuses on the actor’s stylized presentation, not her attractiveness — supports her claim. But differences of opinion in the evaluation of a film or a performance are not at issue here. What concerns us is Variety’s subsequent decision to place an editor’s note at the top of the 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.”
If Variety felt the language in Harvey’s review was insensitive and insinuating, it had the option of working with him to fix that in the editing process before it ran. There are also ways Variety could have acknowledged and responded to Mulligan’s criticism, rather than simply capitulating to it and undermining its own critic in the process. The imposition of a subjective value judgment (“her daring performance”) as a flat editorial perspective, as if it were a matter of inarguable fact rather than opinion, is particularly inappropriate. We believe the editor’s note should be removed.
Like any journalism, film criticism often displeases those being written about. And, like any journalists, film critics must have the support of their publications when that displeasure, usually coming from people far more powerful than any journalist, is made known — especially when that publication claims to report on the industry those powerful people inhabit. It is appalling that, in this instance, Variety chose to side with that power rather than supporting its writer.

Just so. I congratulate the National Society of Film Critics and challenge every other film critics’ group in the United States to issue a similar statement of support for Harvey.