Back in December, Variety had tacked on an apology on top of resident film critic Dennis Harvey’s “Promising Young Woman” review, written more than 11 months prior. Harvey filed the review during the Sundance Film Festival in January of 2020, but the apology didn’t appear until Mulligan complained to the N.Y. Times‘ Kyle Buchanan in December of 2020, referencing Harvey’s review.
“I read the Variety review because I’m a weak person,” Mulligan told Buchanan. “And I took issue with it. It felt like it was basically saying that I wasn’t hot enough to pull off this kind of ruse.”
Here’s the excerpt from Harvey’s review that irked Mulligan:
“Mulligan, a fine actress, seems a bit of an odd choice as this admittedly many-layered apparent femme fatale. Margot Robbie is a producer [of Promising Young Woman], 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.”
After a month of silence, Harvey responded to the backlash, saying “I did not say or even mean to imply Mulligan is ‘not hot enough’ for the role,” Harvey has told Shoard. “I’m a 60-year-old gay man. I don’t actually go around dwelling on the comparative hotnesses of young actresses, let alone writing about that.”
Much like most of “cancel culture,” we are supposed to suspend disbelief, pretend we don’t know facts, and believe that Harvey’s remark slipped right through Variety‘s editors for 11 months without anybody saying anything about it. Variety’s apology was meant to be a cleansing of Harvey’s “sin.” Suffice to say, he’s been thrown under the bus. And for what exactly? Mulligan is great in the movie, but Harvey was allowed to state in his review that he would have preferred Robbie in the role — instead, he’s being called out as a sexist by the social media hoardes for stating what is, essentially, a casting preference.
You know what’s even more disturbing? Why are, so few in film criticism defending Harvey. The answer is quite simply because they’re all absolutely frightened to speak out. This is a guy who has been in the field for 30 years and not one of his former or current colleagues is going to bat for him. I’m just disturbed by the way things are going. You can’t defend a person who’s under attack by cancel culture without the risk of hurting your career. This is the result of the ultra-progressive cleansing of doublespeak. I don’t think film journalists realize how dangerous this is to the field, how harmful it will be to the overall notion that freedom of speech is a given right. What Harvey said wasn’t hate speech or sexist, it was wrongthink, a form of herd disobedience.