Film Criticism Was Never Meant to Be Measured by Consensus

Twenty years ago, I bought a domain name and launched this website. If you go to the Wayback Machine you will see that I spent a lot of time (many years in fact) quoting the opinions of film critics, often featuring their words as cornerstones in my own posts. We would sometimes collect review excerpts and build posts that bolstered the profile of newly released movies. In those days, the tastes and inclinations of Oscars voters were usually very far away from what the film critics liked. Part of what I wanted to do back then was to help bridge that gap, to show what movies were being praised by critics so that more of them might be considered for the Oscar race.

It took me a very long time to figure out that the industry had no intention of shaping their own behavior around what the critics thought. The long game for studios is profit, so they made movies mostly with audiences in mind, with little need to please critics. So they would produce a movie, market it, release it, and the moviegoing public would decide its success or failure. Critics might occasionally be able to hold a film aloft, even after a box-office disappointment, like Almost Famous or The Insider, so that it would have a shot at Oscar nominations. But for the most part, movies were made to be launched out into the crowd, to sink or swim in theaters, not cultivated in hot houses and custom delivered to Academy voters.

Thing began to shift after the Oscar dates were pushed earlier in the year, carving away weeks when a movie previously would have a chance to prove itself. Starting in 2004, after Million Dollar Baby swooped in at the 11th hour to shake things up with its sudden impact, every Best Picture winner has come from the curated ranks of the festival circuit. Rather than wait for audience reaction, the narrative is now driven by film critics and bloggers, with many movies groomed for the Oscars not even seen by the public until after nominations.

Film critics, meanwhile, became a relative term with new rules of eligibility. When I started, there still were actual film critics, and virtually all of them wrote for print venues. They were among the upper-echelon staff at major publications like Entertainment Weekly, the Chicago Sun-Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, LA Weekly, and the Wall Street Journal. Those outlets carried weight and prestige and thus, their critics did too. The Thursday night before a film opened, we would wait for the reviews to drop. We would comb through them to read what our favorite critics thought about new movies. Their verdict was not black and white, positive or negative, but instead sometimes mixed. The word “qualified” means “certified,” and it can also mean “not absolute; with reservations.” Good criticism should be both, and the best reviews then always were.

I was part of the movement that would eventually lead to the mess we have now because I began to aggregate those opinions into posts to suss out a consensus, and eventually Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic came along to turn that effort into mathematical formulas. But before long, as print media was forced to make cutbacks, the renowned high-profile critics were fired and replaced by less adept writers, bloggers, and journalists — anyone that they could pay less to do roughly the same job. What would it matter, right? By then, it hardly mattered at all, as long as someone could spin a good line to serve as a blurb. There was no turning back. As things stand today, all that seems to matter now is the grotesque fixation on red tomatoes or the splat of a rotten tomato, and ultimately that numerical score. Even my friends who ought to know better will say to me, “This movie has a such and such score on Rotten Tomatoes so it must be good, or it must be bad.” Read a review? Parse the nuance, contemplate the subtleties of the written word? Who has time for that. What’s the number, what’s the score?

It’s a shame. The gradual degradation of the art of film criticism is a great loss to the culture of film appreciation. Because this over-simplified system of rating an artistic creation was never meant to be the function of any kind of criticism, whether art, or literature, or cinema. It’s sad that movies have suffered the most damage and sadder still that we’ve gone along with it. Imagine walking into an art gallery and finding tags on the paintings that label them “fresh” or “rotten.” How absurd and disgusting that would be.

No, the nobler aim of film criticism (and the aspiration we risk losing) is for movie writers to take moviegoers deeper into the experience. Instead, exacerbated by the rise of social media, film criticism today has largely done the opposite: it lets the worst traits of mob mentality to form tribes for or against a film, enabling thousands of vicious little emperors at the Colosseum to jab their thumbs up or thumbs down. If I may put on my amateur sociologist hat for a minute, I would venture to say that humans aren’t prepared for what Twitter or Facebook does to the human brain. Early human tribalism would encourage the clustering of like-minds in the hive. That rigid closing of ranks might mean the difference between survival or death. Anyone who dared think outside that hive would need to be ostracized, else they endanger the harmony within the hive. That prehistoric survival strategy in probably woven into our DNA. Mass hysteria, nationalism, xenophobia are all evidence of the crude remnants of the linked hive mind. Because as long as the hyper-sensitive fears of one individual can spread quickly enough, the prickly alarm signals might save the entire tribe.

A strange thing has happened to me with a particular film this year, and it’s reinforced my belief that film criticism was never intended to form a consensus. I saw Little Women at a SAG screening with the entire cast and director present. I was already quite excited to see the film, based on the trailer, based on the material’s pedigree, based on the talents of actresses I admired. I was anticipating a big lush Oscar movie that would invite me to sink into its pleasures the way the best movies do to me. But right away I felt cut adrift with the jumbled structure of the storyline. Even though I knew the story and can appreciate experimental techniques when handled skillfully, I often had no clue what was going on. After the credits rolled, the opinions of those around me were decidedly mixed: many liked it a lot, and many others not so much. From long experience, I felt quiet alarms go off. This movie, for all its attributes, could leave a lot of people in the lurch.

The eventual critics’ reaction, however, has painted a strong, unanimous consensus, ensuring that this film would rank as one of the year’s best, at least in numerical terms, with a 95% Rotten Tomatoes rating. For completeness and comparison’s sake, let’s look at the Rotten Tomato scores for all of this year’s major contenders:

On the critics side of the equation, we see these numbers:

Parasite — 99%
The Farewell — 98%
Knives Out — 97%
Dolemite Is My Name — 97%
The Irishman — 96%
Marriage Story — 95%
Little Women — 95%
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood — 95%
Honey Boy — 94%
Uncut Gems – 93%
Ford v Ferrari – 92%
Dark Waters — 91%
1917 — 90%
The Two Popes — 89%
Rocketman — 89%
Hustlers — 87%
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood — 85%
Waves — 85%
Queen & Slim — 83%
Jojo Rabbit — 79%
Harriet — 73%
Richard Jewell — 72%
Joker — 69%
Bombshell — 67%

Now let’s look at the audience scores, to see where they diverge:

Ford v Ferrari — 98% (21,000)
Harriet — 97% (11,000)
Richard Jewell — 96% (3,500)
Dark Waters — 95% (2,300)
Jojo Rabbit — 95% (4,000)
1917 — 94% (200)
Parasite — 93% (2,100)
Knives Out – 92% (20,000)
Little Women – 92% (3,400)
Queen & Slim — 92% (11,000)
Dolemite Is My Name — 91% (113)
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood — 91% (10,000)
Honey Boy — 91% (500)
The Two Popes — 89% (750)
Joker — 88% (65,000)
Rocketman — 88% (21,000)
The Farewell — 87% (2,400)
The Irishman — 86% (1,000)
Bombshell — 83% (2,814)
Marriage Story — 83% (160)
Motherless Brooklyn — 80% (2,500)
Waves — 80% (293)
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood — 70% (26,000)
Hustlers — 65% (16,000)
Uncut Gems — 54% (3,500)

Looking at the disconnect between these two lists is a reminder that a consensus built with the RT formula can’t tell us as much about film criticism as it does about the harmonious buzz from within the hive. These scores only tell us what a specific group of lucky people think and often as a hive — this is the realm of Film Twitter, mostly the recipients free screening invitations. Especially when the well-being of the hive tips heavily in one direction, the innate human desire to not be ostracized can come into play, so reviews (even mixed reviews) can be weighted and worded to fall in sync with the most popular movies. They’ve all seen what can happen to movie writers who find themselves on the 5% rotten side of the fence, and nobody wants to suffer that fate. But that kind of calculation, whether conscious or subconscious, isn’t film criticism. In many instances, we have to wonder why members of the inner circle clique tend to circle the wagons in consensus opinions, while the scores from regular moviegoers who don’t worry about being outcasts tell a very different story. Since there’s safety in numbers, we want to pay attention to the sheer weight of thousands of ratings, as well. When we go on Amazon we don’t want to buy products that have a few dozen or even 100 customer reviews. We look for the items that have 4.5- and 5-star ratings from thousands of happy buyers.

Money changes everything. If you’re out there putting down cold, hard cash in the theater lobby (Netflix films being an exception to this since people have a different attitude about movies they can see inside the Netflix subscription model), you are going to want some sort of tangible pay off, not just the second-hand experience of films made for film critics. We’re paying for the orgasm — we’re not paying to watch critics masturbate. Some of the most stark disconnects I see here are the wide chasm created by Uncut Gems, which hit really big with critics but not with audiences, as well as Harriet and Ford v Ferrari, which are major hits with audiences who feel they got exactly what they wanted, but not so well with critics who didn’t.

We see the majority of the films sit somewhere in the high middle with audiences because audiences are looking for something different than film critics are. It’s also important to remember that critics are obligated to see just about everything; audiences are already predisposed to like what they have chosen to go see. Demands met and expectations fulfilled.

All of this is to say that I have long since stopped paying attention to the aggregate score on Rotten Tomatoes, because it won’t ever tell me anything that I don’t already know. I already know what Film Twitter thinks about a movie. I know it long before the movie has even been released to the public because of all the people who saw everything in advance at Telluride or Toronto and then cluster into their social media circles. Worse, that atmosphere can so easily coalesce into a hive mind, and too many people are too intimidated to step outside of it. So they tend to agree more than disagree.

Gone are the days when I would read a review by Kenneth Turan and then one by Owen Gleiberman or A.O. Scott or Lisa Schwarzbaum and gain intriguing new perspectives with each new review. Their thought-provoking opinions could deepen an experience of a movie because their reviews were not anonymous reviews, nor were they part of a hive. They were well-considered takes by people who had big microphones and thus, by dint of their distinguished track records, could truly help shape how we talk about and watch movies. But that has now been replaced by the hive and the hive can’t abide disagreement.

So what do we see when we look back at how these numbers played out for recent Best Picture winners?

Green Book — RT 78%, audience 91% (9,000)
Shape of Water — RT 92%, audience 72% (25,000)
Moonlight — RT 98%, audience 79% (44,000)
Spotlight — RT 97%, audience 93% (70,000)
Birdman — RT 91%, audience 77% (92,000)
12 Years a Slave _ RT 95%, audience 90% (140,000)
Argo — RT 96%, audience 90% (204,000)
The Artist — RT 87%, audience 87% (58,000)
The King’s Speech — RT 95%, audience 92% (144,000)
The Hurt Locker — RT 97%, audience 84% (95,000)
Slumdog Millionaire — RT 91%, audience 90% (1,155,543)
No Country for Old Men — RT 93%, audience 86% (398,721)
The Departed — RT 91%, audience 94% (737,000)
Crash — RT 74%, audience 88% (442,000)
Million Dollar Baby — RT 91%, audience 90% (400,000)
Return of the King — RT 93%, audience 86% (34,679,773)
Chicago — RT 86%, audience 83% (400,000)
A Beautiful Mind — RT 74%, audience 93% (490,000)
Gladiator — RT 76%, audience 87% (34,128,168)
American Beauty – RT 87%, audience 93% (660,000)

Those are the raw numbers. Make of them what you will. I’m not quite sure what going backwards in time proves. For one thing, the further back we go, the effect of social media diminishes until it gradually vanishes altogether. But the one thing I know is that Best Picture winners, for instance, win for a variety of reasons. Sometimes because they are four quadrant crowd-pleasers. Sometimes they win because they involve filmmakers that voters feel are overdue, like the Coen brothers, or Kathryn Bigelow, or Martin Scorsese. Sometimes they just want to push the movie because the movie stands for something that means something personal to them.

But getting back to the hive mind and Film Twitter and Little Women, which turns out is not a divisive film in the least little bit — with unanimous praise from most critics, many Oscar watchers were confused and even angry that the film did not make a better showing with the Golden Globes or the SAG nominations. With nothing else to go by, how could fans of the film understand why such a prestigious Christmas movie with such rave reviews would be shut out? It had to be, many concluded, sexism. Bubbling up online, word spread that men didn’t want to see the movie at all, so of course they didn’t they vote for it. Nevermind that the HFPA and SAG have reached a near perfect degree of gender parity, with a far better balance than any of the other major voting groups. But in the absence of any reviews that even seemed to be mixed, misogyny had to be the explanation. Bear in mind that Ford v Ferrari has great reviews, good box office, an amazing audience score (not to mention an A+ CinemaScore) and terrific deep-bench talent in its cast. And yet, for all that, it still didn’t get named for Outstanding Ensemble at SAG or for Best Picture at the Globes. Maybe when a well-liked movie fails to get a nomination, it’s not the evils of misogyny but simply the bountiful downside of a very competitive year.

No doubt the energy, conversation, and debate around Little Women will help the film with Oscar nominations. Part of the problem is that there are a lot of movies that are pretty good, but not better than the top-tier frontrunners, competing for the remaining spots. The heat of this convo will likely ensure Little Women is pushed to the top of the pile of screeners. So fans can rejoice in that.

What bothers me about the way this has unfolded is that there appears to be zero dissent, and anyone who’s tries to be a lone voice of resistance can expect to be executed on the spot. I’ve not seen a single serious conversation about the film’s disjointed structure, no defense of why that choice was made, and no question whether the experiment worked. Of course I realize that to many viewers it wasn’t confusing. Particularly for Alcott acolytes, it was a glorious redux of all the familiar tropes. For me, not being all that familiar with the arcs of the characters, I felt lost. It surprised me that not a single major critic I can find has talked about it. Not one. So I got myself into trouble yet again by suggesting that some critics — not all — were perhaps grading on a curve as I believe they often do when actors endeavor to direct. Not all, but many: Bradley Cooper, Ben Affleck. This is nothing new. Go further back and consider whether Mel Gibson and Kevin Costner benefited from a sigh of relief when their movies turned out not to be ego-trip catastrophes. This isn’t something I can prove, and of course many people were insulted by it. Many many. The only explanation I’ve been given by the firing squad is that the problems I feel with the film simply don’t exist, that it’s all inside my head. They would rather believe I have a “blind spot” or, worse, a personal vendetta.

It isn’t my obligation, nor the task of users on Rotten Tomatoes, to whip up an apologetic analysis for a movie that works for some but not for others. Yet, in a few instances of films this year, that might be the only way to field any dissenting point of view. Ideally, it’s the job of experienced film critics to describe a movie’s cinematic strategy and determine whether risky techniques work or else don’t. I wish I could find a critic who does that with Little Women, I really do. But the more the online critic community functions as a hive, praising and supporting each other on Twitter for like-minded reassurance, the more they are rewarded for being a harmonious part of an elite and exclusive club. The more their uniformly acquiescent reviews serve to simply prop up the hive, the less effective they are at providing those distinctive, deeper, thoughtful observations about film where diversity of opinion is permitted to veer off in one direction or another.

We know, going back decades to look at past trends in reviewer’s attitudes, that the critics’ first swing at assessing movies has a checkered hit-and-miss history. So do the Oscars. So can audiences. But when we shut down critical thinking, beat down nonconformity, and substitute individuality with group think, I believe ultimately the whole point of thoughtful film criticism has vanished, and you might as well use the audience scores if a consensus is all you’re looking for.