Dennis Harvey, a self-described 60-year-old gay man who’s reviewed movies at the far-left Variety for 30 years, is now worried about losing his job for criticizing the latest woke sensation, a movie called Promising Young Woman.

Some background…

Promising Young Woman (which I’ve not seen) is about a young woman named Cassie (Carey Mulligan), who sets out to avenge a friend’s rape and murder by hanging out in bars, pretending to be wasted, and exacting revenge on men who try to take advantage of her intoxicated state.

Sounds like Death Wish for Social Justice Warriors…

Anyway, almost exactly a year ago, after it premiered at Sundance in January 2020, Harvey reviewed the movie for Variety.  His write-up was mostly positive, but Harvey closed with this:

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.

Flash-forward a year…

After some Oscar buzz started to hit Promising Young Woman, the Internet found Harvey’s paragraph and America’s Woke Nazis began attacking him as a misogynist. This included Carey Mulligan herself, who told the far-left New York Times last month:

“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.

…

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.”

To their forever shame, Variety responded by apologizing to Mulligan!

At the very top of the year-old review is an editor’s note that reads:

Variety sincerely apologizes to Carey Mulligan and regrets the insensitive language and insinuation in our review of “Promising Young Woman” that minimized her daring performance.

So, in front of the whole wide world, Variety dropped their own guy right in the hot grease. So much for the idea that attacks on the media are attacks on everything good and pure about America…

This apology, this attempt to appease the Woke Nazis, has of course failed. It’s Munich all over again, which means that Variety giving the Woke Nazis what they want has only made them thirst for more, so now Harvey’s job is on the line.

“His professional fate remains uncertain,” wrote the far-left Guardian Thursday.

In his interview with the Guardian, Harvey added: “It’s left in question whether after 30 years of writing for Variety I will now be sacked because of review content no one found offensive until it became fodder for a viral trend piece.”

Even if he’s not fired, thanks to an insecure actress and his own quisling employer, Harvey’s reputational fate is sealed. After a 30-year career, this absurd smear as a “misogynist” is what Harvey will be remembered for. And Mulligan is still attacking the guy, and being allowed to do it at — get this — Variety!

For his part, Harvey, who has apparently decided to start defending himself, told the Guardian:

I did not say or even mean to imply Mulligan is ‘not hot enough’ for the role. 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.

…

[Margot] Robbie is a producer on the film, and I mentioned her just to underline how casting contributes to the film’s subversive content – a star associated with a character like Harley Quinn [Robbie’s Suicide Squad character] might raise very specific expectations, but Mulligan is a chameleon and her very stylised performance keeps the viewer uncertain where the story is heading… Mulligan is certainly entitled to interpret the review however she likes, her projection of it suggesting she’s ‘not hot enough’ is, to me, just bizarre. I’m sorry she feels that way. But I’m also sorry that’s a conclusion she would jump to, because it’s quite a leap.

Let me start first by saying that gay guys sitting around judging the looks of various actresses strikes me as a very “gay guy” thing to do, but that’s neither here nor there…

The impression I got reading Harvey’s review is not what he says in his defense above, but that he felt Mulligan was miscast. He calls her an “odd choice.”

Of her character, he says, she “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.”  Those words tell me he believes the character’s appearance choices (clothes, wig, voice) work against what she’s trying to do, which is to bait young men into preying on her. Wouldn’t a young woman looking to attract young men appear more conventionally sexy? is what his point seems to be.

In other words, Harvey appears to be saying, This performance would have been more believable if the character was a sexy femme fatale as opposed to a mousy weird girl.

Not having seen the movie, I have no opinion on whether or not Harvey is correct, but there’s no question that is a perfectly valid opinion to hold and express.

As a reviewer, Harvey is supposed to communicate his opinions and thoughts, and he should be allowed to do that without fear of his own employer stabbing him in the back or some insecure actress pulling his wings off in public in the hopes her woke-sadism rallies Oscar voters to her side.

 

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