COVER STORY : COMMENTARY : Critiquing Movie Critics--Why Some Watchdogs Become Blind

As soon / Seek roses in December, ice in June; / Hope constancy in wind, or corn in chaff; / Believe a woman or an epitaph, Or any other thing that’s false, before / You trust in critics. --Lord Byron, 1809

Critics should be like Maimonides, a guide for the perplexed. Critics should be like the Shadow, a white knight intimately familiar with the evils that lie in the hearts of men. Critics should be like Robespierre, “the incorruptible,” a first line of defense for their readers against the barrage of multimillion-dollar advertising and publicity campaigns with which studios regularly bombard civilians. Critics should be a lot of things, most of which they’re not.

While critic-bashing tends to be a popular sport of practically Olympian proportions, the irony is that of the three groups affected by film reviewers--the talent, the studios and the public--it’s the first two who invariably grumble the most but in reality have the least grounds for complaint. For neither performers nor studios are the critics’ intended audience--they are, in a sense, eavesdropping on a conversation between the critic and the public, and if they don’t like what they’re hearing, they shouldn’t listen in.

And simply by the nature of their work, the relations critics have with creative types are always going to be adversarial. Actors, directors, screenwriters, etc., react with understandable pain and anger when publicly taken to task: no one--not even critics--likes negative treatment and, as the daughter of a critic friend reminded her parent, “You’re killing their babies!”

As for studios, they tend to regard critics as unruly adjuncts of the marketing department, useful for filling up newspaper quote ads and out of line if they venture anything more. Studios would like to be able to depend upon critics to be reliable cheerleaders for films with good intentions, and executives with an eye on the fiscal risk any halfway serious film entails often can’t understand why scribes don’t form an orderly line behind any earnest effort, no matter how misguided or soporific.

Critics and audiences, however, ought to be natural allies. They both want the same thing--a film that doesn’t waste your time and money, nor trash your intelligence--

and as consumers, not manufacturers, neither one should care if the actors or the studios take offense if they themselves feel like they’ve been swindled.

However, it’s not only the moviemakers who have been shortchanging audiences lately, it’s the critics as well. Though in an ideal ivory-tower world, a critic’s main task would simply be to articulate his/her most intimate response to the work in question, the reality is that most day-to-day deadline writing scribes have a more mundane reason for being that should not be ignored: to serve the public that makes their existence (not to mention their salaries) possible.

That trust, unfortunately, is frequently betrayed, as dutiful readers are, more often than not, not getting the criticism they deserve and think they’re paying for. Instead, critics often compromise their positions in ways in which their audience is not even dimly aware. I am by no means without guilt in this area--no critic that I’m aware of is--but I am going to cast the first stone anyway simply because, a la “Network,” I’m tired of the situation and I’d rather not take it anymore.

Though those who blab about film on TV fall outside the scope of this piece--it wouldn’t be very sporting to attack so feeble a target, now would it?--they are an essential starting point. The very fact that they exist and are tolerated, even welcomed, as critics by large numbers of people inevitably means that the standard for what is acceptable criticism has to be lower than almost ever before. Now, not even simple literacy is a hard-and-fast requirement, let alone anything more demanding, like coherence.

Interestingly enough, it’s the very nature of the job, the ways it makes filmgoing different for the critic than for his audience, that begins to make it difficult for the professional filmgoer--for that’s what a critic really is--to connect with any more or less normal readership.

If you are at all conscientious, you begin your critical life, as you may have begun your personal film viewing life, by trying to absorb everything that’s out there. As a friend put it, you approach your job with the psychological equivalent of a huge catcher’s mitt, boasting, “Nothing gets by me.” Unfortunately, what that mitt encompasses includes a surprising amount of stuff no one in their right mind would even think of looking at. All those movies whose ads you skim in the Sunday paper and say, “No way I’m seeing that one,” the critic has suffered through. True, that’s just part of the job, but experiencing all that detritus couldn’t help but have deleterious effects: a junk-film diet makes movies that are so-so seem like masterpieces.

Even more insidious in that regard is the feeling you get when you realize that way more than half of what you’re viewing not only isn’t any good, it isn’t even worth your time. When that happens, you have two choices: you can get another job or you can unconsciously compromise your standards.Since I would be a pathetic fool to be wasting all my time watching trash, you say to yourself, it follows logically that what I’m watching must be worthwhile. Clear to you, kemosabe, but not necessarily to anyone else.

Aside from having our brains enervated by processing more mush than the human mind was designed to handle, critics are prey to a whole range of professional personality disorders that remove us even further from the grail of rendering a beneficial uncompromised view of a film to an audience. Consider the following list of maladies: any one of them can enfeeble an ordinarily healthy critic, and a combination of several can render a practitioner useless for anything but collecting a paycheck.

The Schmoozer. What could be more natural for critics, as lovers of film, than to want to hang out and take lunch with those who create what they love? Natural, yes, but crippling as well. Because human nature being what it is, friendship with creative types inevitably means that the reviewer won’t be quite as demanding on his new friends’ work the next time it has to be scrutinized.

This doesn’t mean you love a terrible film just because an acquaintance made it, but it does mean that you take a little off your fastball.

The Big Easy. The hardest thing to do with a film is to approach it alone, on its own terms. Easier, and requiring a whole lot less thought, is the technique of latching onto an obvious handle and basing a review on that, the critical equivalent of judging a book by its cover.

Did Jim Brooks start out on network TV? Then “Terms of Endearment” and/or “Broadcast News” must be “thinly disguised sitcoms.” And if it had been suddenly announced that a regretable mistake in labeling had occurred and in fact Steven Spielberg had directed “The Last Emperor” and Bernardo Bertolucci “Empire of the Sun,” you would have seen opinions flip-flop.

The Idiot Idolaters. Like all good things, the consumer-oriented aspect of reviewing can be taken to a ridiculous extreme, and the Will Rogerses of reviewing, who rarely meet a film they don’t like, are not doing anybody any favors. Though most critics will piously insist that getting quoted or “blurbed” in newspaper ads is the farthest thing from their lofty thoughts, a surprising amount tend to write in eminently blurbable prose.

You don’t have to experience many mirthless “laugh riots” or snore through films that putatively “pack a wallop” to understand how totally devalued and worthless to the public the nominal language of criticism has become. And calling every film that has a semblance of plot “a masterpiece” --can anyone sincerely believe that Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket” is “the best war movie ever made,” as one critic insisted?--reflects more on the lack of background viewing of the writer than the quality of what is being written about.

Revenge of the Nerds. Critics sometimes use reviews to pay off the most obscure of scores. Obviously angry at what they felt was the excessive praise given to “Less Than Zero,” the novel, reviewers took it out on “Less Than Zero,” the film. Chagrined at having helped create the monster that was “Gandhi,” critics who had been blind to all of Sir Richard Attenborough’s flaws when reviewing that film suddenly discovered each and every one of them when confronted with “Cry Freedom.”

Plot Junkies. Possibly weaned on a diet of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, these reviewers feel their job is done if they’ve managed to construct a plausible summary of what they’ve seen. Worse still is the breed that thinks nothing of blandly giving away every nuance of the most surprising story line to their justifiably outraged readers. After all, the more plot they reveal, the less writing--and thinking--they have to do themselves.

I could go on--another critical foible--but at this point the question arises as to why anyone should put up with critics in the first place. We bother with them for the same reason we bother with the medium they criticize: When they are good, they are invaluable.

In theory at least, a critic can do many things at once: Inform, entertain with lively writing, enlighten with hard-won insight, make us think about the film--and by implication the society it reflects--in ways we hadn’t the wherewithal to see by ourselves.

And even when we don’t agree with them, adroit critics can guide us, not to bombastic star turns which speak well enough for themselves, but to experiences, like John Boorman’s “Hope and Glory” or Gus Van Sant’s “Drugstore Cowboy,” that we might not have considered otherwise.

It’s true that critics can be unreliable nuisances, but, like democracy, they are better than the alternative. And remember, please, what one editor said when press excesses were being criticized during the Gary Hart imbroglio: If you want a good watchdog, you have to put up with a lot of barking. A hell of a lot of barking.