The critic’s critics

Hanging a reporter for a human moment

Ton media o be a critic is to live and to write vicariously. We pronounce judgment on films we had no hand in making, and when we’re not blowing our own horn we’re revelling in the echo of someone else’s. Listen to this amazing thing that Harrison Ford/Sigourney Weaver/Naomi Watts told me. Me! And now I’m telling you!

It’s an odd life, but we tend to assume a kind of invisibility when it comes to celebrity interviews. They’re the story; we’re the conduit. We bask in their glow, but never expect to get burned.

Not so at the recent Cannes film festival. There, at a press conference for Mad Max: Fury Road, the Toronto Star’s Peter Howell — a good friend and a damned fine critic — asked a question of Tom Hardy that briefly made Howell the story.

Here is his allegedly offending query: “I’ ll preface my remarks by saying I have five sisters, a wife, a daughter and a mother, so I know what it’s like to be outgunned by estrogen. But I just wanted to ask you, as you were reading the script, did you ever think: ‘Why are all these women in here? I thought this was supposed to be a man’s movie?’ ”

Those single quotes, invisible and yet essential, make it clear what Howell was doing. He was asking if the actor had thought about the feminist angle in Mad Max. Howell (the conduit, remember) had, and he loved it, but he wanted to know the opinion of Hardy (the story).

“No,” said Hardy. “Not for one minute. It’s kind of obvious.” He looked pained for about a tenth of a second — long enough for a frame grab to show him “grimacing” at the question. There was laughter from the assembled journalists, a brief clap at this funnyangry response. Added Hardy: “But also, in reference to the concept of having a script, that would have been nice.” And the conference continued on the topic of the screenplay, or apparent lack thereof.

It wasn’t until two weeks later, after the festival had ended, that the website BuzzFeed dredged up the exchange and deemed it insensitive, even sexist. Howell found himself pilloried in the press; major media outlets including the Huffington Post, USA Today, Globe and Mail and, alas, the National Post ran the story of “Tom Hardy’s perfect reaction to journalist’s sexist question.” Howell told me the stress was a surefire way to lose five pounds, though not one he’d recommend.

The worst part of this story is that if you know Howell you know he’s a paragon of feminism. But few BuzzFeed (HuffPost, GlobeMail, NatPost, etc.) readers know him. And his “preface” was deemed proof of guilt, like the racist who says some of his best friends are black. (No one ever stops to think that having black friends, and admitting it, doesn’t automatically make you a racist.) Comment sections on media websites, open to anyone with a loose grasp of grammar and a firm sense of self-righteousness, filled with vitriol.

It got me thinking about the human side of celebrity journalism. The critics are human (though we may appear sub-human when slouching toward a morning screening with bed-head and a cup of coffee). And the stars are human. Yes, even Tilda Swinton.

As humans are wont to do, we say dumb things, or (in Howell’s case) potentially misunderstood ones. I once sat down with a British actor and was getting along nicely when he made a punchy remark about another celebrity. And then he turned ashen; it was on my voice recorder. I laughed it off, telling him it wasn’t going to make the papers. Though I told him: “That was a very brave and potentially — ”

“— ludicrous statement,” he finished. But why roast the guy over something anyone might say in a jocular moment?

Cannes is full of questions far worse than Howell’s. My favourite this year was the reporter at the press conference for Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario, who “wanted to ask Josh (Brolin) and Benicio (del Toro) what it was like having the gang from No Country for Old Men back together,” only to be reminded by del Toro: “I’m not in that gang.” It was Javier Bardem who starred in No Country. Oops.

Back in 2007, a reporter at a Cannes press conference asked Atom Egoyan how he watched movies — meaning in the cinema, on a computer, etc. Egoyan, pretending to misunderstand, asked if the reporter wanted to know what he was wearing. The frivolous exchange didn’t sit well with Roman Polanski; a few minutes later he remarked: “It’s a shame to have such poor questions, such empty questions. Frankly, let’s all go and have lunch.” And he walked out.

I contacted BuzzFeed about their story — the reporter who posted it said she was too busy to talk that day, then never responded to my followup emails. Her editor sent no reply at all. I was curious how such a non-event had been spun — weeks after the fact, mind you — into a minor media sensation.

Did someone at BuzzFeed really misinterpret the question, which I’d heard at the time from several metres away and understood perfectly? Or was this, to give the story a BuzzFeedy headline, a case of “Website Uses Character Defamation as Click Bait”?

In the absence of a response, we can make up our own minds. Howell, meanwhile, was forced to apologize — an odd term, since it suggests he did something wrong. One apologizes for punching someone, for bumping into someone, or for an ill-timed sneeze; Howell’s was somewhere between the second and third type.

As to the other examples of misspeaking: The British actor (probably jet-lagged) who made an ill-advised remark into my voice recorder shall not be named. Nor the unfortunate journalist who confused two Spanish-speaking actors. But I can reveal the scribe whose innocent question to Egoyan caused Polanski to storm out of a press conference. It was me.

We say dumb things, potentially misunderstood things