The Audience of Critics

I want to return to a discussion of Woody Allen’s film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. It was pointed out to me by a good friend that in an article on his blog, Andrew Collins criticises the movie, and Allen’s recent career, fairly strongly. I have a few issues with this review that I thought I’d raise here. Firstly, Collins’ appreciation of Woody Allen seems to be based on a kind of hero worship only, and he states several times that he prefers films in which Allen is the leading man. He refers to an interview with him, which he calls the highlight of part of his career. Moreover, he doesn’t appear to understand the crucial style of Allen’s films that distinguishes them from all other filmmakers – that they are not either comedy or drama, but an entirely original mixture of the two. In his review of the film, he also misunderstands a vital point of the plot (that the woman in the window is the character’s ex-wife), and instead focuses on whether there is a light in a fridge or not. This could be explained if he wanted it to be, but I think engaging in such nit-picking is unbecoming of a critic.

This is the point I’m coming to. In his review, Collins is clearly influenced by other critics in the screening with him. He validates his thoughts of the film by referring to their reactions. It wasn’t just him that was appalled, they were too. He later gives details that this was a Warner Bros. screening, introduced by a PR. This in no way reproduces how most of us go to the cinema or watch a film at home. We too are influenced by other people when we watch a film (this is part of the joy of watching films, after all, unlike reading a book), but they are either a mass audience in the cinema, or friends and family at home. Watching a film with a group of other critics (and agents from the distribution company) must be a profoundly different experience, and one none of us can relate to. How valid, then, are their reviews? How useful to us are they? I believe films will be unnecessarily praised and unfairly panned (as is the case here) in such an atmosphere as this. Of course, such reviews might be the exception, and many critics are surely able to get past what actually we can now see as a disadvantage to them (even if they are advantaged in seeing films early). We might go so far as to say that this critical atmosphere doesn’t end in the screening room. When they write their reviews, do they write for us, or with one eye on what other critics are thinking? You might argue that how we watch a film doesn’t influence our thoughts on it, and I would disagree strongly. The question for me is whether critics have become isolated from the cinema-goers they are trying to communicate with and, if so, how can we redress the balance?