If you want to hear four film journalists — TheWrap editor Sharon Waxman, Independent film critic Clarisse Loughrey. Wrap assistant managing editor Daniel Goldblatt and Wrap reporter Brian Welk — totally tiptoe around the National Society of Film Critics having called on Variety to remove an apology it added to a review of Promising Young Woman and afford critic Dennis Harvey a bit more respect…if you want to hear four people dodge this issue like their lives depend on it and say almost nothing of substance, please click on the embedded link (“Summer of Soul Director Questlove”) and go to the 28:20 mark.

Waxman doesn’t tiptoe as much as the other three, but they mostly seem to feel that Harvey misunderstood the film and expressed himself inelegantly — that, to them, is the main issue. Otherwise they have zip to say about Variety undercutting Harvey and totally groveling before Mulligan and Focus Features, etc.

Clarisse Loughrey: “[I was] a little dismayed as a woman…I do think that we have to give room to women’s concerns about [Harvey’s] review….I did take issue with [it] although not in the sense that something should be done about this.”

Will you listen to her? Loughrey almost believes that Variety‘s 11-months-later apology was the right thing to do, and that Harvey was guilty of an actual mistake in perception. This is exactly what the NSFC didn’t say, of course, but nobody points this out to her.

I’ve said repeatedly that I don’t agree with what Harvey seemed to be saying in the review, and that relative hotness standards have nothing to do with sexually predatory behavior by young males, and that Mulligan’s dry, stylized performance was chilly but compelling.

Mulligan didn’t ask for an apology. Variety offered one willy-nilly after she mentioned her displeasure with a certain paragraph in mid-December ’20 to N.Y. Times award-season columnist Kyle Buchanan. If Variety editors had an issue with that paragraph they should have addressed it with a counter-review or an editorial after it first appeared in January ’20. But they didn’t say or do anything for a full 11 months.

February 12, 2021by Jeffrey Wells19 Comments