When British soccer players of opposing teams flare up and shove each other around on the field, the press call it “handbags” — as in, grown men shouldn’t behave like genteel middle-class ladies swatting each other with their receptacles in a famous "Monty Python" sketch. “Handbags” is now what’s going on between the mutually dependent worlds of American movie criticism and production/publicity. The specific antagonists are David Denby, one of the New Yorker’s two distinguished critics, and Scott Rudin, the eminent producer of David Fincher’s remake of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo."
Denby’s mostly positive review of the thriller appears in today’s New Yorker. You’d think that would be music to Rudin’s ears. However, the producer and Sony Pictures, which is releasing the film on December 21, are furious because Denby broke the embargo he and other members of the New York Film Critics Circle agreed to in writing when the film was screened for them.
Against Denby’s wishes, the NYFFC brought their awards ballot forward this year so that it would benefit publicly from being the first critics’ group to announce its winners, as it did on November 29. Rudin and Sony, hoping that “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” would take home a trophy, showed the film to the NYFCC critics and members of the National Board of Review on November 28, but embargoed reviews until December 13. Denby’s jumping the gun by eight days is likely to trigger the premature publishing of other reviews.
Indiewire.com has published the email correspondence between Denby and Rudin that took place on Saturday.
In response to Rudin’s aghast response to Denby telling him of his decision to publish the review, the critic wrote: “Grown-ups are ignored for much of the year, cast out like downsized workers, and then given eight good movies all at once in the last five weeks of the year. A magazine like the New Yorker has to cope as best as it can with a nutty release schedule. It was not my intention to break the embargo, and I never would have done it with a negative review. But since I liked the movie, we came reluctantly to the decision to go with early publication.”
Denby added that “the early vote [by the NYFCC] forced the early screening of ‘Dragon Tattoo.’ So we had a dilemma: What to put in the magazine on December 5? Certainly not [Cameron Crowe’s] ‘We Bought the Zoo,’ or whatever it's called. If we held everything serious, we would be coming out on Christmas-season movies until mid-January. We had to get something serious in the magazine. So reluctantly, we went early with ‘Dragon,’ which I called ‘mesmerizing.’ I apologize for the breach of the embargo. It won't happen again. But this was a special case brought on by year-end madness.”
Rudin wasn’t appeased. “Your seeing the movie was conditional on your honoring the embargo, which you agreed to do,” he wrote to Denby. “The needs of the magazine cannot trump your word. The fact that the review is good is immaterial, as I suspect you know. You've very badly damaged the movie by doing this, and I could not in good conscience invite you to see another movie of mine again.... you must at least own that, purely and simply, you broke your word to us and that is a deeply lousy and immoral thing to have done.”
“Immoral” may be putting it a bit strongly in the scheme of things, though the ethical issues were skewed from the start. Denby shouldn’t have agreed to the embargo in the first place — critics should never kowtow to the industry (even if they do so with the intention of ultimately reclaiming their independence in print). Despite Sony's claim that “embargo dates level the playing field and enable reviews to run within the films’ primary release window,” the studio shouldn’t have gone after the critics’ awards while denying them the right to write about their film. (Warner Bros., for example, refused to show the Rudin-produced “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” to the New York critics.) The NYFFC shouldn’t have voted on the best films of the year without seeing “Extremely Loud” — a Stephen Daldry picture starring Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock that presumably has awards potential.
In the event, the NYFCC did not give “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” any awards. But whatever objections Rudin and Sony have, their spat with Denby and the New Yorker will amount to considerable pre-release publicity. Denby’s review is likely to be one of the most widely read of the year and, since he applauds the film, that should have a helpful effect on ticket sales. The New Yorker benefits because it cast the first critical vote on the movie in print and emerges as the voice of authority. Everyone wins, except Crowe and 20th Century-Fox, whose zoo comedy-drama Denby offhandedly dismisses, albeit in a private email made public. Were he to choose to do so, which is unlikely, Crowe would have a right to let fly with a handbag.