One Trade Town
So here’s a thing that happened this month in our “Don’t call it a monopoly” fearlessly independent trade press.
Back in December, Carey Mulligan did an interview with the NYT pegged to the release of Promising Young Woman. The conversation segued into this:
Before the pandemic scuttled its original spring release, “Promising Young Woman” had a buzzy debut in January at the Sundance Film Festival. I asked Mulligan if she had read any of the responses to it then, and she winced.
“I read the Variety review, because I’m a weak person,” Mulligan said. “And I took issue with it.” She paused, debating whether she really wanted to go there. “It felt like it was basically saying that I wasn’t hot enough to pull off this kind of ruse,” she said, finally.
Though “Promising Young Woman” earned its fair share of raves at Sundance, Variety seemed stumped by the movie and strongly implied that Mulligan had been miscast. “Margot Robbie is a producer here, and one can (perhaps too easily) imagine the role might once have been intended for her,” read the review. “Whereas with this star, Cassie wears her pickup-bait gear like bad drag; even her long blond hair feels like a put-on.”
Mulligan can still recite some of the lines from that review. But she said, “It wasn’t some sort of ego-wounding thing—like, I fully can see that Margot Robbie is a goddess.” What bothered Mulligan most was that people might read a high-profile critique of any actress’s physical appearance and blithely accept it: “It drove me so crazy. 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.”
Twitter, as it does, erupted in the usual calls for blood and heads on a pike that makes it such a famously warm and nurturing environment:
Fair enough, we all live in the media killing fields now. Say or write something stupid in this day and age, be prepared to die for it. This is the life we’ve chosen and all that.
But just to take a step back, what was it that the Variety critic on the festival beat actually said? Not the snippet quoted by Mulligan as “basically saying that I wasn’t hot enough to pull off this kind of ruse.” Was a Variety film critic actually stupid enough to say a lead actress wasn’t hot enough? The lead actress of, as Mulligan points out, a stridently feminist empowering film? That would be a pretty serious stroll through the gardens of stupidity.
Here is what he wrote, the complete text of Harvey’s commentary on Carey Mulligan’s performance:
Mulligan, a fine actress, seems a bit of an odd choice as this admittedly many-layered apparent femme fatale—Margot Robbie is a producer here, and 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. The flat American accent she delivers in her lowest voice register likewise seems a bit meta, though it’s not quite clear what the quote marks around this performance signify. Still, like everything here, this turn is skillful, entertaining and challenging, even when the eccentric method obscures the precise message.
A few things about this:
Carey Mulligan is entitled to take away what she takes away, and if she felt it was offensive and belittling, that is her experience. But as far as the text goes, nowhere does he say, suggest, or imply that Carey Mulligan isn’t “hot enough” for the part.
The one line about her appearance “Cassie wears her pickup-bait gear like bad drag; even her long blonde hair seems a put-on,” is awkwardly put, and somewhat contorted suggestion that she doesn’t seem wholly comfortable in this fatale role.
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