As the actress embarks on a publicity tour for the first female-led Marvel movie, Brie Larson has a message for white males: Move to the back of the line.
The Oscar winner said she picked Keah Brown to interview her for a recent Marie Claire profile because the journalist has cerebral palsy and is a woman of color. That’s commendable. Less so is Larson’s posturing.
“About a year ago,” Larson explains in the interview, “I started paying attention to what my press days looked like and the critics reviewing movies, and noticed it appeared to be overwhelmingly white male.”
Shifting that dynamic and elevating an obscure journalist by asking her to profile you is a kind thing to do but also, and I want to add this without cynicism, it’s a great way to get good press.
Here’s what Brown says about Larson in her Marie Claire story:
Would a white male have said that? Well, we’ll never know.
Despite Larson’s fixation on gender, Manohla Dargis, a female movie reviewer at the New York Times, was not in love with “Room,” the movie that gave Larson her Oscar for Best Actress.
White males from Rolling Stone and New York magazine liked her performance much more. To Dargis, Larson was an “overly muted supporting player.” But Rolling Stone’s Peter Traverse called her “magnificent,” and New York magazine’s David Edelstein said he didn’t “know how to do [her] justice.”
Nevertheless, the “Captain Marvel” star still wants dudes to put down their pens and tape recorders. She made a noninclusive point about inclusion last summer when she argued that male movie reviewers should shut up about “A Wrinkle in Time” because it wasn’t made for them.
“I don’t want to hear what a white man has to say about ‘A Wrinkle in Time.’ I want to hear what a woman of color, a biracial woman has to say about the film,” Larson said during an acceptance speech. Never mind that “A Wrinkle in Time” was a film that everyone desperately wanted to like but was about as close to the book as Earth is to Madeleine L’Engle’s planet Camazotz. Even a white man could see that.
Larson does have a point, however. If you want a positive interview experience, choose a journalist who is more likely to understand your background. If you want a positive movie review, choose a reviewer who will empathize with the directorial decisions behind the film, even if the execution falls short. If “Captain Marvel” flops, at least it has diversity for sympathetic movie reviewers to acclaim.
