Posts Tagged ‘patronizing male critics’

July 9, 2010

This Week in Patronizing Male Reviews of Women’s Art

I’ve been looking forward to seeing The Kids are All Right since hearing about its debut at Sundance. It’s out this week, getting reviewed positively everywhere.  The Times’s A.O. Scott says it’s “the best comedy about an American family since …” Because it is without precedent, he decides to “let the superlative stand unqualified for now.” He praises director and screenwriter Lisa Cholodenko for the way she “blends the anarchic energy of farce — fueled by coincidences and reversals, collisions and misunderstandings — with a novelistic sensitivity to the almost invisible threads that bind and entangle people.”

The San Francisco Chronicle’s Mick LaSalle calls it “rich and psychologically truthful work.” Fresh Air’s David Edelstein considers the political implications:

Cholodenko has a female partner and a child, and in a political climate hostile to gay families it must be hard for her even to suggest that two moms might not be enough. But she’s a true dramatist. She tests what is presumably her own design for living; she bombards it with every satirical weapon in her arsenal. Then she picks up the pieces and rebuilds.

Reading and hearing these reviews today confirmed the unease I felt reading Anthony Lane’s New Yorker review last night. Lane loves the movie, too. But his review is marred by strange and patronizing assumptions about the director/screenwriter’s intentions. After noting that California of TKAA “is a greener, gayer update of the California that Woody Allen took such perfect potshots at, more than thirty years ago, in ‘Annie Hall,’” he declares that “Cholodenko doesn’t always know that it is funny.”

Huh?

He goes on to tell us more about Cholodenko’s intentions

She wants us to laugh at Paul’s initial response when he learns of the family setup . . . and she rightly notes the casual, bantering racism of the liberal bourgeoisie . . .

Then he asks whether

the screenwriters not realize that half of the women’s conversation—”We just talked conceptually,” “It hasn’t risen to the point of consciousness for you,” “It’s so indigenous!”—is pure, extra-planetary prattling and nothing but? The prattle turns chronic when Jules, who fancies herself as a landscape designer, is hired by Paul to reshape his back yard; she suggests “a trellisy, hidden garden kind of thing,” or, alternatively, “you could go with the Asiany.”

The assumed answer to this patronizing question is no.  Cholodenko and her co-writer share their characters’ lack of self-awareness.

Is it me or is this the second patronizing review of a woman’s work from a major publication this week?