Fin: Don’t judge a movie by the director’s Twitter likes

Also, RIP Morgan Spurlock, a chaotic Ronald Reagan movie, and vague chaos in Wildwood

Red Rocket (A24)

The Cannes Film Festival is over, and the big winner was Anora, American filmmaker Sean Baker’s latest film, which took home the Palme d’Or. The film is described in the New York Times as “a giddily ribald picaresque from the American director Sean Baker about a sex worker who marries the son of a Russian oligarch — and things get very messy.” Anora was picked up by NEON — distributor, now, of five straight Cannes winners — and should arrive in theaters later this year. 

Baker previously directed Tangerine, The Florida Project, and Red Rocket, all of which are excellent, and he seems to have settled on an m.o. of examining the heart of America through the prism of sex workers. Sure, that risks being repetitive, but the films have been different enough tonally and consistently great. 

But on the other hand… have you considered the director’s problematic Twitter likes? 

So, it appears that three years ago, Sean Baker liked some tweets on then-Twitter arguing that Kyle Rittenhouse — who shot multiple people during a protest in Wisconsin in 2021 — was innocent. 

Now, personally, those are not tweets that I would have liked. The conservative embrace of Rittenhouse as a celebrity is somewhat gross, and the gun fetishism with which he’s associated is a particularly vile American tendency. 

That said… as beyond-the-pale political sentiments go, I’m not sure that calling Kyle Rittenhouse innocent is one of the worst. After all, he was acquitted in court. Plus, it’s not as if liking those tweets somehow goes against the sentiment of Baker’s work. If the director of Tangerine had liked anti-trans social media posts, that would be another thing altogether.

Plus, if Baker's politics may hint towards the right, while his films express an empathy that hints more towards the liberal—wasn’t that the arc of Clint Eastwood’s later-period career, when he was making Million Dollar Baby, Letters From Iwo Jima, and Gran Torino? Of all the ‘separate the art from the artist” arguments of the last decade, this might be the stupidest.

Even weirder is the ask towards the critics: These are people at a film festival in France who are sharing their instant reactions to the world premiere of a movie. Before posting honest reactions, are they supposed to research whether the filmmaker ever posted anything problematic? That’s ridiculous. Is my job as a critic to review the director’s social media posts rather than the movie?

 (I’ll also note that the response to this demand for denunciation of Baker’s Twitter likes was met with almost universal negativity.)

I am looking forward to Anora, and if the director’s political views are seen as less than pristine, I assume that will become part of the discourse. But to demand that critics reacting to a Cannes premiere first examine the filmmaker’s social media likes before weighing in on his film is just laughable.