POISON PENS
Sometimes critics take it one (or two) steps too far
Actor Jamie Dornan made an interesting confession a few weeks ago. He told BBC listeners that bad reviews had sent him into hiding.
Dornan was a guest on Desert Island Discs, the long-running British radio show in which various celebrities imagine being stranded on an island and name eight pieces of music they'd like to bring along with them.
The Irish-born film star's choices ranged from Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Waters to a Philip Glass violin concerto. He also left the impression that there are worse things in life — negative criticism perhaps? — than being marooned on an island.
It will soon be a century since an acid-tongued Dorothy Parker demolished Katharine Hepburn with the observation that Hepburn “runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.” Hepburn, like so many of her contemporaries, learned how to survive such slings and arrows. But the sensitivity level in today's entertainment culture seems more fragile.
Dornan was shattered by the “ridicule” levelled at him following the release of the eroticallycharged Fifty Shades of Grey in 2015 — which had one critic writing that his work had the charisma of “oatmeal.” So in response, he and his family secretly fled to a countryside retreat provided by the film's sympathetic director. While the movie itself racked up huge profits internationally, Dornan simply disappeared. “We just shut ourselves off from the world,” he told listeners.
Bottom line: Dornan couldn't stand the heat. Still, his response was more dignified that of the Sex Pistols' Sid Vicious who once assaulted an unfriendly critic with a bike chain and left him bleeding on the floor.
Furthermore, Dornan is not alone. Actress Daisy Ridley has said that five years after the release of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker she still hadn't recovered from the critical lashing she and the film received.
Last year, Canada's Seth Rogen charged that negative criticism hurts everyone. “It's devastating,” he told podcast interviewer Steven Bartlett. “I know people who have never recovered from it, it's very personal — something that people carry with them literally for their entire lives.”
Some celebrities deal with the problem by never reading reviews. That's how Woody Allen manages an often-turbulent life and career. Frances Hyland, one of Canada's great postwar stage actresses, always refrained refrain from reading reviews until the play's run was over: she knew a negative notice could throw her but also feared that a rave review might make her dangerously complacent. However, she also argued that she could learn much of value from a critic she respected.
Longtime Stratford Festival artistic director Richard Monette was a distinguished actor earlier in his career. His paranoia about critics began when he played Hamlet in Toronto, and the next morning read a review that began with the words: “If your name is Richard Monette read no further ...”
For many years afterward, Monette couldn't sleep after an opening night: he had to be up at the crack of dawn to check the reviews. He couldn't bear the thought of not knowing what they said about him.
Brendan Behan, a booze-soaked Irish playwright who enjoyed a brief success in the early 1960s, famously compared critics to “eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves.”
There's entertainment value in such a comment, but also irony. After all, a play like Behan's anarchic frolic, The Hostage, owed its international success to critics prepared to acknowledge Behan's innate theatricality — despite a ramshackle script that only became stage worthy through the collective intervention of legendary director Joan Littlewood and London's Theatre Workshop gang.
The late John Hurt, best known for his title performance in The Elephant Man, took a more measured view of criticism. Once, after being slammed by London's Daily Express for his performance in a new play, he drunkenly dispatched a brief letter to the reviewer: “Dear Peter. Whoops. Yours sincerely, John Hurt.” Back came a response: “Dear Mr. Hurt, thank you for your short but tedious letter. Yours sincerely, Peter.” To which Hurt replied: “You win.”
Hurt was amused by the exchange, but in general would advise against retaliating against a critic. “Critics are writers and if you say something on impulse, they've all the time in the world to think of some witty riposte,” he once wrote. Besides there were critics he respected — “with them, you sit up and take notice.”
But Hurt had no time for personal attacks. He was outraged when colleague David Warner was called “moose-faced” by one reviewer, but that comment is relatively benign compared with more recent assaults.
Reviewing Melissa Mccarthy in the movie, Identity Thief, critic Rex Reed called her a “female hippo” and “a gimmick comedian who has devoted her short career to being obese and obnoxious with equal success.”
Veteran Variety critic Owen Gleiberman, joining the debate about Renée Zellweger's remodelled look, used his review of Bridget Jones's Baby as an opportunity to talk about actors “having work done.” The piece was subtitled “If She No Longer Looks Like Herself, Has She Become A Different Actress?” This prompted a furious response from actress Rose Mcgowan in The Hollywood Reporter: “What you are doing is vile, damaging, stupid and cruel. It also reeks of status-quo white-male privilege.”
The late John Simon, New York Magazine's longtime critic, belonged in his own infernal category. His comments on Bernadette Peters's performance in the musical, On the Town, was so vicious that she needed time off from the run in order to recover. Simon was unrelenting in his hostility to Liza Minnelli, chortling over “that lumpy nose overhanging a forward-gaping mouth and hastily-retreating chin, that bulbous cranium ...” His comments on Barbra Streisand's nose bordered on antisemitism and his hostility to non-traditional casting smacked of racism.
Simon loftily contended that a negative review “had to sting — this is the only way it is noticeable, the only way it could make a difference.” Actress Sylvia Miles would register her disagreement one night when she spotted Simon in a Manhattan restaurant and emptied a plate of pasta over his head.
One of the most famous responses to a critic emanated from the White House. President Harry Truman's daughter, Margaret, was an aspiring singer, and Washington Post critic Paul Hume panned her recital, saying that she didn't sing very well, was constantly going flat “and still cannot sing with anything approaching professional finish.”
The president fired off a furious letter to his daughter's tormentor. “It seems to me that you are a frustrated old man who wishes he had been successful,” Truman fumed. “Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you'll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes and perhaps a supporter below!”