Seventeen years since I started doing it for a living, I’ve finally been told which films I’m allowed to write about. Sliding Doors? Yes! If you’re a middle-class white woman who lives in London, that’s legitimate subject matter. Its heroine is a media type. I too take the tube – though a parallel universe doesn’t usually pop up if I miss the Piccadilly line. Happy-Go-Lucky? Just about: Sally Hawkins plays a teacher – uh-oh – but at least I’m also learning to drive. Bridget Jones? Not on your nelly. I don’t keep a diary. I don’t like chardonnay. I’ve never even slept with Hugh Grant.
Now I know my limits, I shall stick strictly to movies which directly intersect with my own experience. So no more mafia masterpieces, or anything in a foreign language, or which involves war, aliens, gay people, a time before 1979, or cartoon jellyfish. The only thing I will see on screen is myself refracted back, for it is the veracity of this alone that I am in a position to judge.
The people who belatedly told me this – mostly, as it happens, also white, middle-class women – were those who agreed with the stars of Ocean’s 8 that their film would have met with better reviews had the proportion of female critics been higher. They echoed the actor Brie Larson, who the previous day declared she didn’t care what a “40-year-old white dude” thought of Ava DuVernay’s little-loved fantasy A Wrinkle in Time as, by definition, he wouldn’t get it.
Earlier this week, Jessica Chastain echoed Larson’s call for critics to reflect a diverse society, as did Baltasar Kormákur, director of a new movie about a heroic lady sailor – which has, in fact, had warm write-ups, including from our male writer. Earlier this month, a survey revealed 80% of US critics are men and 82% are white.
Those are bad stats. Evidently there’s an obstacle somewhere along the line that means certain people tend not to enter a certain profession. But clamping down on the scope of that profession is a rum way to address it – as well as being patronising, illogical and dodgy. All feedback is void, runs the rationale, unless you’re either the target market for a film or vaguely resemble the people in it (there’s some confusion over which). It sanctions the silencing of people by dint of their age, ethnicity and gender. This is rarely a good look.
So, Finnish pensioners must be muzzled as they exit Avengers: Infinity War, even if they enjoyed it. Should my son see The Little Mermaid, I’ll be sure to shut him up if he looks like he might try to discuss it. Women like films about women who are like them, and black people like films about black people. Hooray for the pigeonhole!
And yet the apparently wildly racist members of the Academy awarded 12 Years a Slave and Moonlight their top prize. Reviewers raved about them too, somehow managing to see beyond their own skin, while the cinema-going public proved sadly less imaginative – for best picture Oscar-winners, neither film made a lot of money in the US. The best-reviewed movies there last year were Lady Bird, Get Out, Coco, The Big Sick, Dunkirk and Wonder Woman – a selection almost impeccably unrepresentative of the people writing the reviews.
The debate about the intersectionality of film critics has become a hectoring convention of people having their cake and eating it. The muddle is troubling. How does an inclusivity mission sit with telling someone without ovaries to keep mum about Mamma Mia!? The most famous film critic of all time – the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael – rarely gets a namecheck. Two of the most respected reviewers in the US at the moment happen to be the LA Times’s Justin Chang (35, Chinese American) and the New York Times’s Manohla Dargis (57, female).
How do you square the insistence that there are exciting and important women’s stories overdue for the telling with remaking Ghostbusters? You can’t just blame the studios. Their primary job is to make money, and if that means jumping on bandwagons and yoking themselves to brand awareness, so be it. The fact remains that punters showed up: despite the backlash and poor reviews, Ghostbusters took $230m worldwide. Meanwhile, they conspicuously failed to turn out for other 2016 releases that could perhaps lay greater claim to being essential female narratives (as well as better movies): films such as Queen of Katwe ($10m) and Toni Erdmann ($12m), 20th Century Women ($7m) and Things to Come ($6m), Maggie’s Plan ($5m) and American Honey ($2m), Certain Women ($2m) and The Fits ($170,000). Yet as female-fronted spin-offs go, Ghostbusters still felt more organic than Ocean’s 8 ($177m so far), whose psychological weirdness can only really be explained by the fact that, for better or worse, it is unusual for eight women to club together and commit grand larceny.
Perhaps there is something else going on here too: a diminishment in the value we place on whether something is actually any good, rather than on whether we just hope it’s good, as that would be handy. The basic quality of something, be it a movie or a review of it, has become, if not quite redundant, then certainly something skirted around.
Considerations of script, performance, direction, taste, plausibility and originality must be managed against those of intention, politics and climate. Asking if certain films are actually any cop can seem in itself impudent, perhaps renewing an offence tackled in the film. The standing ovation that erupted at the premiere of Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation at the height of #OscarsSoWhite fever in 2016 demonstrates how appetite can trump sense. The film was terrible, but people only clocked that a few months later, when Parker’s involvement in a sexual assault case came to light. Had it not, this ghastly turkey would probably have been for ever lauded.
When it comes to culture, objectivity has become an increasingly dirty concept. And the imputation is therefore that the endeavours of anyone who has dedicated their professional life to judging things have been at best fruitless, at worst fraudulent. Yet anyone who has seen a film, eaten a sandwich, sat on a chair, or engaged with anything for which a quality benchmark exists, must know that sacrificing standards does no one any favours. Not the person who’s given up time and money to see the movie, the film-makers making genuinely good movies, the journalists trying to write good reviews, or the readers trying to make head or tail of them.
One thing I like about cinema is that it gives me a break from my own parochialism: my stupid face, my petty concerns. I’d thought one of the points of art was to offer fresh perspectives. Happy-Go-Lucky is a fine film. I’d happily give it a repeat viewing. But if I knew I would be forced to watch it and variations on it for all eternity, I think I’d have opted for a different job.
• Catherine Shoard is the Guardian’s film editor
