It happens like clockwork every year. A film comes out of a festival sitting on a cloud boosted by the word of critics that are left speechless post screenings. The filmmakers receive standing ovations, Oscar pundits run off to their hotel rooms to write their four star reviews, and the film itself is placed front and center in movie discussions for weeks. Things look very good for that film, but then a few months later the knives come out.
Glowing reviews from August and September turn into vitriolic pissing contests where anything nice said is redacted or erased. Discussions like this just don’t make sense on an objective level, movies are an art form and deserve to be measured on their own strengths and weaknesses. Oscar backlash is hardly a new trend, yet it seems to have gotten more publicized and nastier in recent years.
Last year two excellent films came out in the form of Lincoln vs. Zero Dark Thirty, both received good word from their respective fans before receptions turned bitter in January. Talking points from Rep. Joe Courtney about historical voting records and Glenn Greenwald’s vendetta against the depiction of torture in Zero Dark Thirty drastically altered the word surrounding both films and film journalists picked up on it. What was once about filmmaking quickly turned into about what should win best picture, and then devolved into film critics offering their own pet theories about history and trashing the legacy of Abraham Lincoln. Critics weren’t talking about the polished efforts of Steven Spielberg and Kathryn Bigelow anymore, they were flinging whatever mud they could find.
Surprisingly, the pinata for 2013 appears to be none other than Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave. It comes with no surprise, however, that the critic leading the charge against 12 Years A Slave is none other than noted contrarian Armond White. White takes particular offense in what he considers to be an exhibit of the grotesque, “for McQueen, cruelty is the juicy-arty part; it continues the filmmaker’s interest in sadomasochistic display, highlighted in his previous features Hunger and Shame.”
If that weren’t quite enough he goes on to add “brutality is McQueen’s forte. As with his fine-arts background, McQueen’s films resemble museum installations: the stories are always abstracted into a series of shocking, unsettling events.”
That White would attempt to tear down such a critically-acclaimed feature shocks no one, but more respected bloggers are starting to turn the tide on a film that seemed invincible coming out of Toronto International Film Festival.
The chief complaint being that McQueen loses sight of his character amidst all the chaos and brutality of his experience as a slave in the Antebellum South.
“[the film] cheapens Solomon’s experience by presenting it as an educational string of episodic horrors” – Slant’s Ed Gonzales
“[12 Years a Slave fails] to convey his main character’s inner life either as a free man (very briefly) or 12 years a slave” – The Hollywood Reporter’s Kirk Honeycutt
“the movie for people who think they’re too smart for The Butler” – Village Voice‘s Stephanie Zacharek
There is a lot of condescension in these words, but none of those quoted above go as far as ArtsMeme’s Robert Koehler in personally blasting the director as a man uninterested in story. “He (McQueen) takes narratives that seem incredible on paper and could possibly make for great movies, then he distorts them into treatises on the body in various states of pain.” As a director Steve McQueen has never embraced sentiment in any of his previous works. Not in Hunger and especially not in Shame.
12 Years A Slave was never going to be a warm bath for those watching, rather a moment of self reflection for a country with a bloody past. McQueen has been critiqued in the past for obfuscating his stories by placing favor on artistic imagery that evokes feelings instead of characters, though suggesting that he is incapable of doing more than painting a picture onscreen is laughable.
This isn’t to say that a disagreement about the quality of a film can’t be had (it should always be encouraged) but one wonders if it is all for the dog and pony show that has become the norm when writing about celebrated films post festival coverage. Critics are sometimes reactionary creatures and this push-back looks like it may just be one more announcement that winter is here. If critics cannot see the forest for the trees then the awards they so passionately push for will continue to prove itself irrelevant.
4 thoughts on “’12 Years A Slave’ Dissenters Serve As Another Reminder that Oscar Season Is Here”
First of all, I don’t think these any of these critics mentioned “passionately push” for awards – I’d go as far as they don’t care one bit. Whether they’re “right” or “wrong” with 12 YEARS (that idea – that a negative review cannot be insightful or meaningful – is already an ignorant misstep given claim to in this piece, especially given how many of the “four star reviews” often tell us nothing about a film’s intentions, meanings, and context). While I find the writing by Anderson and Koehler to be a little too vitriolic to my tastes, Ed Gonzalez’s piece brings up very reasonable objections, and the un-noted by this writer piece by Adam Nayman is seriously worth contending with (even White’s piece has some statements of value before it falls into certain traps). To connect these reviews to the words by Glenn Greenwald and the senate committee on ZDT is a dangerously patronizing and false equivalency. I’m also confused how the supposed statement of sentiment has anything to do with Koehler’s quote provided, because Koehler himself is not suggesting that a lack of sentiment is the problem. “One cannot help but wonder if it is all for the dog and pony show that has become the norm when writing about celebrated films post festival coverage.” It’s really not, especially considering that many of these critics saw the film at the same time, but instead of rushing out of the gate to declare a film an Oscar-bound masterpiece, the writers sat, reflected on the work, and came up with their takes in more considerate thoughts, which is something that I don’t see in this writer’s piece in hoping to bash the idea of an intelligent critical debate instead in favor of consensus.
You don’t think a film critic for The Hollywood Reporter cares or pushes for awards?
“To connect these reviews to the words by Glenn Greenwald and the senate committee on ZDT is a dangerously patronizing and false equivalency.”
It’s not a direct connection, just one more example of Oscar pundits using their words to sling mud instead of addressing a film for its own attributes. Mr. Honeycutt may have seen ’12 Years’ at Telluride or Toronto, but Ms. Zacharek and Mr. Gonzales saw the film after the initial gushing and I can’t help but think that the need to pushback on the film was what drove some of the more condescending comments regarding McQueen’s film.
If you take that as bashing debate after my last paragraph, I’m not sure what to tell you.
Colin, the problem with the premise of your piece is that critics of 12 YEARS A SLAVE belong to a “backlash.” Now, while there may be some critics who lie in wait like a hunter in the woods shooting down easy prey, there are others who saw the movie fresh and new, and didn’t like it. I saw it at its first press screening in Toronto, didn’t like it then, and don’t like it now. I wasn’t alone. There were several critics at that screening–most of them, I should note, not from the US–who disliked it. Really disliked. Maybe even more than I did. We weren’t “backlashing.” We were just responding to what we had just seen. I found myself in a friendly but firm back-and-forth with Owen Gleiberman in line for a subsequent movie that same day. Owen loved it. I realized after a short time of kicking it back and forth with him that he was having a hard time grasping that any sentient, thinking human being could possibly dislike it, let alone dislike it like I disliked it. My Argentine colleagues and me were equally amazed that anyone could love it so much. I began to have flashbacks of the crazy American critics’ first response in Sundance to BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD, another hugely overrated American movie. It’s this feverish, hungry response. It comes from folks who spend their lives watching too many horrible movies. When they see something that’s not horrible, they tend to overreact. I understand it, it’s human, it’s normal. But it’s the big critics trap. A lot of them have fallen into it again with 12 YEARS.