The Cardinal Sin of Film Criticism

I'll need examples to illustrate my point, so I'll use two somewhat recent reviews by Anthony Lane: this review of Inside Man (The New Yorker, 20 March 2006) and this review of American Dreamz (The New Yorker, 17 April 2006). He's a critic of great stature so I'm sure that neither his feelings nor his reputation will be hurt by anything I say here, and should it come to fisticuffs I'm pretty confident that I can take him.

Anyway, in both of these reviews Mr. Lane makes statements based on incorrect details from the film under consideration. About Inside Man he says:

The screenplay, a first-time effort by Russell Gewirtz, displays a double gift: it is clever enough to clutch our attention, but also dumb enough, with large logical holes punched through it at regular intervals, to make the audience feel equally clever for having spotted the mistakes. These include: (1) Voice recognition. Russell may be clad in shades and a white balaclava, but he converses with Frazier in person, and, given that Clive Owen’s American accent keeps slipping like an old sock, it should not be hard to pick him out of a lineup.

And about American Dreamz he says:

Among the other contenders are an Orthodox cantor turned rapper, of whom we see not nearly enough, and a sweet, stumblebum Arab (the film is too chicken to specify his country of origin) by the name of Omer (Sam Golzari), who just happens to have been trained, somewhat reluctantly, as a terrorist.

I've noted these errors before, and corrected them: Dalton Russell never ends up in a police lineup (he's still hidden in the bank when Frazier is interviewing the hostages), and we are told that Omer is from Baghdad (which, granted, isn't his country of origin, but come now). But it isn't the errors per se that bother me.

Film critics see a lot of films, and errors are unavoidable. Plot details are virtually impossible to fact-check (if it's an advance screening no one has seen the film yet!) and there's nothing wrong with garbling a name or distorting some specifics of the story. Roger Ebert, for one, is prone to small mistakes of this sort, but his criticism is rarely any the worse for it.

What I object to are the significant critical judgments Lane issues based on these errors. His claim that Inside Man is "dumb [...] with large logical holes punched through it at regular intervals" is invalidated by the faulty evidence that he supplies to support it. Likewise his claim that American Dreamz is "cowardly."

Article Author: A. Horbal

The author's name is Andrew Horbal. He blogs about film criticism at No More Marriages! and writes about film for Lucid Screening and PopMatters. He thanks you for your time and consideration.

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