During last night’s Crystal + Lucy Awards in NYC, Brie Larson decided to give a speech about the recent USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative which stated: "an overwhelming majority of film critics — 78% — are male, and only 22% are female." Her best defense of the findings was to mention as an example Ava DuVernay‘s "A Wrinkle in Time," which, she explains was “a love letter to women of color,” and that it acquired its bad reviews because it “wasn’t made for” the majority older white male critics demographic.
“Am I saying I hate white dudes?” Larson asked. “No, I’m not, [but if] you make the movie that is a love letter to women of color, there is an insanely low chance [that] a woman of color will have a chance to see your movie and review your movie.”
“[Audiences] are not allowed enough chances to read public discourse on these films by the people that the films were made for,” Larsen went on. “I do not need a 70-year-old white dude to tell me what didn’t work for him about "A Wrinkle in Time." It wasn’t made for him.
I want to know what it meant to women of color, to biracial women, to teen women of color, to teens that are biracial.”
I understand Larson's thinking here, and, yes, "Wrinkle In Time" did garner a 40% Rotten Tomatoes rating, and, again, yes, most of the critics that reviewed it were in fact older, white male critics and not POC female critics. Her statement basically reads as an indictment of the unfairness and overall unreliability that she sees in today's film criticism, because, well, according to her at least, some movies were "made for" a specific demographic that is just not represented in today's world of film criticism.
However, objective evaluation should have NOTHING to do with identity politics, but that's what Brie is essentially mixing in here. An indisputably great film shouldn't necessarily be "made for" any particular demographic. Great art should be universal.
It’s interesting how she says that "A Wrinkle in Time" “wasn’t made” for a reviewer, specifically because of his skin color. I mean, I don’t care where you fall on the political spectrum, but that comes off as a genuinely discriminatory thing to say and, given that seemingly everyone who saw it didn't think it was very good, it's probably not the best movie to pick as an example.
And so, with all that being said, I decided to partake in a little experiment.
"A Wrinkle in Time" has 70 reviews from female film critics on Rotten Tomatoes. 35 are positive and 35 are negative, that's a 50% score. Despite the female perspective, it is still a "rotten" movie.