It’s impossible to start the conversation with Time magazine’s film critic Stephanie Zacharek without first asking about Harvey Weinstein. She laughs.
“We had all heard stories for years that he was grabby,” she says on Monday earlier this week, of the movie mogul in the news for reports of sexual assault. “It’s also – I’m not excusing it – but a very old-fashioned casting couch thing that’s been going on since the beginning of Hollywood pretty much. It’s good that this is changing, but I think a lot of us weren’t really that surprised when the news broke.”
Zacharek, 56, has just got off a flight from New York to be in Mumbai for the Young Critics’ workshops being held ahead of MAMI, which starts today. A Pulitzer Prize finalist and long-time critic, Zacharek has been with Time since 2015. “I really love the idea of writing for a mainstream audience and communicating in a clear way,” she says. “Not necessarily dumbing stuff down but not writing like a super intellectual, like you’re trying to impress people. That kind of writing has always turned me off.”
Zacharek’s prose is warm and fluid, her critical appraisals both carefully crafted and utterly accessible. Her discerning examinations have included why Wes Anderson leaves her cold and the nature of violence in films.
“One of the things that’s exciting to me about writing about film is there’s so much going on, there’s so much to look at, to think about, that I just find it energising and invigorating,” she says. “But when you sit down and write about it, you have to be able to translate that experience, to something that means something to the reader. And that’s the big challenge.”
There are other workaday challenges too. “The films hardest to write about are the ones in the middle ground where they’re not terrible but they’re not great, but kind of boring, like other things you’ve see before,” she says. “You have to think of something interesting to say about them, that’s really hard.”
Weaned on a steady diet of old classics on television and Pauline Kael’s reviews in the New Yorker – stacks of which her mother brought home from work – Zacharek grew up reading about the movies as much as watching them. “Kael made movies come alive for me on the page,” she says. “That’s kind of what I aspire to; to open up a world for people.”
And she has already had an impact on the cultural landscape – in 2015 her work at The Village Voice made her a finalist for the Pulitzer for Criticism.
Before that, Zacharek studied journalism and stumbled into film reviewing laterally, initially reviewing rock music in the early nineties for a Boston paper. After 11 years at Salon she moved to an online film magazine where she was let go when her position was removed in 2012. In general, positions for full-time critics have decreased in the recent decades. “In terms of how much influence we have, I think individual critics have a lot less influence because there’s so much on the Internet,” she says. “There are so many voices that there are really very few that stand out or that have any influence over peoples viewing decisions at all.”
The Internet has made everyone a writer, it’s also made some people active troll warriors, and Zacharek has been at the receiving end of aggressive hostility – including rape threats – for negative reviews of films like Guardians of the Galaxy and The Dark Knight . “At the time I didn’t even know what to think of it,” she says. “It was horrifying [that] there were people out there who would say this stuff just because they had this veil of anonymity… it was really ugly.”
She isn’t crazy about superhero films and she’ll tell you straight up, what she loves and hates, often responding viscerally rather than intellectually to what she sees. “Oh, interesting film, interesting ideas,” she says, in faux seriousness, of some critics who often veer cautiously in the middle. Her eyes widen, she tilts her head. “Well, what is he saying, how is he saying it, do we necessarily have to like it just because he is an interesting filmmaker?” she asks. “There has to be more to it than that.”
Which brings up the question, how much scholarship should a critic have at the tip of their fingers? “It’s not like you have to have seen everything or have encyclopaedic knowledge of every film made or every genre but you have to keep going,” she says. “You have to have a pretty good grounding in classic cinema and keep seeing new things and catching up with old things you may have missed. And keep doing that to the end of your days. That’s what I plan to do,” she states.
