Over at the Federalist, Mollie Hemingway has a pretty interesting piece up comparing and contrasting the critical response to 12 Years a Slave and The Passion of the Christ. You may remember that The Passion was a legitimate cultural phenomenon,* grossing more than $370 million domestically (and another $241 million overseas) despite being released in a pair of dead(ish) languages (Aramaic and Latin). What you may not remember is that critics heaped scorn on it for its unpleasant violence; it wound up with a 37 percent "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes from top critics (meaning that two out of three major film critics gave it a thumbs down).
12 Years, meanwhile, has been heaped with praise, topping a number of critics association lists and racking up an impressive 98 percent fresh rating from Rotten Tomatoes (meaning that an astounding 49 out of 50 critics give it a thumbs up). Frankly, none of this is terribly surprising; as I noted in my (positive) review, 12 Years a Slave is an "important" film, and "important" films tend to be a bit overpraised. What's notable is the manner in which 12 Years is being praised: its violence, sadism, and intensity are all cited as reasons for its greatness. The lesson that Mollie draws from this strikes me as more or less correct: For critics, the scouring of the Christ-like Solomon Northup is a far more reasonable thing to show than the scouring of the Christ-like Jesus Christ.
There is a provincialism at work here, one that none other than Armond White shined a light on. White** has recently made waves in critical circles for his behavior at the New York Film Critics Circle's annual awards dinner and his subsequent expulsion from that group. His crime? "Heckling"*** the director of 12 Years a Slave.
I wasn't there and I'm not a member of that group, so take all this with a grain of salt. But I do think it's somewhat revealing that the NYFCC decided to expel (rather than suspend, or bar from the dinner for a year) one of their fellows—indeed, a critic who was chair of the organization on three occasions—who had the temerity to pierce their provincialism. It's one thing when White is, say, arguing that Paul W. S. Anderson is a more talented filmmaker than Paul Thomas Anderson. It's another entirely to denigrate the auteur behind an "important" film like 12 Years a Slave. An example had to be made.
I am reminded of John Podhoretz's take on the real version of Pauline Kael's famous line about Nixon voters. "I live in a rather special world," Kael said. "I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them." As Podhoretz notes, the line "indicates that Kael was actually acknowledging her provincialism ('I live in a rather special world') and from its perch expressing her distaste for the unwashed masses with whom she sometimes had to share a movie theater. What this indicates is that, even then, liberal provincialism was as proud of its provincialism as any Babbitt."
Same as it ever was.
*As JVL notes, 12 Years a Slave is decidedly not a cultural phenomenon, despite the fervent hopes and dreams of the provincial left.
**I will once again mount a defense of Armond White: Describing him as a "troll" and saying that his opinions are calculated to inflame to his actual work a disservice. I can't say I agree with him all that frequently, but his work is thought-provoking and steeped in a deep knowledge of the cinema and its history. Walter Biggins has longer thoughts on the matter here.
***White denies the heckling took place.