Everyone loved ‘Blue Velvet’… Except Roger Ebert
Why did the beloved reviewer for the Chicago Sun-Times find himself at odds with his fellow critics?
Robert Ebert — the Pultizer-winning film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times who was considered America’s critic — often took a contrarian position on popular or widely praised movies, including Escape From New York, Die Hard and The Usual Suspects. But Ebert strayed farthest from the pack on one almost universally acclaimed movie: David Lynch’s Oscar-nominated 1986 film Blue Velvet, which Ebert awarded just one star out of a possible four.
How far was Ebert from the rest of filmdom?
Blue Velvet holds a 94 percent “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes’ Tomatometer ranking of reviews, with an average rating of 8.8 out of 10. That’s on par with such films as West Side Story, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Fargo and Moneyball.
Add to that the fact that Lynch got a best director Oscar nomination, star Isabella Rosselini won an Independent Spirit Award for best female lead, and the National Society of Film Critics honored it with awards for best film, best director, best cinematography and best supporting actor (Dennis Hopper), and you would think the critic would have loved the film.
But Ebert hated the movie. He argued that Blue Velvet sabotaged itself:
And yet those very scenes of stark sexual despair are the tipoff to what’s wrong with the movie. They’re so strong that they deserve to be in a movie that is sincere, honest and true. But “Blue Velvet” surrounds them with a story that’s marred by sophomoric satire and cheap shots. The director is either denying the strength of his material or trying to defuse it by pretending it’s all part of a campy in-joke.
Ebert added:
Indeed, the movie is pulled so violently in opposite directions that it pulls itself apart. If the sexual scenes are real, then why do we need the sendup of the “Donna Reed Show”? What are we being told? That beneath the surface of Small Town, U.S.A., passions run dark and dangerous? Don’t stop the presses.
Ebert particularly took issue with how Lynch treated Rosselini:
There’s another thing. Rossellini is asked to do things in this film that require real nerve. In one scene, she’s publicly embarrassed by being dumped naked on the lawn of the police detective. In others, she is asked to portray emotions that I imagine most actresses would rather not touch. She is degraded, slapped around, humiliated and undressed in front of the camera. And when you ask an actress to endure those experiences, you should keep your side of the bargain by putting her in an important film.
Despite Ebert’s review, Blue Velvet has only gained stature in the three decades since its release, according to Dennis Lim, author of 2015’s David Lynch: The Man From Another Place:
“Blue Velvet has weathered the passage of time better than any other Oscar nominee that year, possibly better than any Hollywood movie of its decade. The shock of the new fades by definition, but if it has hardly done so in the case of Blue Velvet, that may be because its tone remains forever elusive. To peruse the early reviews is to sense the emergence of the slipperiest of sensibilities, one that no one quite knew how to talk about. To encounter or revisit the film now, decades later, is to realize that we still don’t.”
How is it that Ebert would stake out a position so at odds with that of most film connoisseurs? Ebert explained in part his criteria for evaluating a film in a 2006 review of Basic Instinct 2:
“I cannot recommend the movie, but … why the hell can’t I? Just because it’s godawful? What kind of reason is that for staying away from a movie? Godawful and boring, that would be a reason.”
Ebert also acknowledged without apology that he could be inconsistent in reviews. In a negative review of 2009’s remake of Last House on the Left, he admitted that he offered a more positive assessment of the cruder 1972 original and copped to it:
I wrote that original Last House review 37 years ago. I am not the same person. I am uninterested in being “consistent.” I approach the new film as simply a filmgoer.
In his defense, Ebert wasn’t the only critic who disliked Blue Velvet. The Washington Post’s Paul Attanasio wrote:
But the puzzling thing about Blue Velvet is that for all of its visionary panache, almost none of it sticks in your mind. Some might see this as a sign of what’s elusive in Blue Velvet, but it’s more about what’s trivial in it.
The story is insubstantial, a Hardy Boys mystery engrafted with noir themes, and it doesn’t go anywhere — the themes are introduced but not developed. The characters aren’t developed, either — they’re stand-ins for ideas about sexuality, not sexual beings themselves.
Ebert’s contrarian review of a few movies didn’t affect his ultimate legacy. The New York Times wrote of Ebert upon his death in 2013:
It would not be a stretch to say that Mr. Ebert was the best-known film reviewer of his generation, and one of the most trusted. The force and grace of his opinions propelled film criticism into the mainstream of American culture. Not only did he advise moviegoers about what to see, but also how to think about what they saw.
Twenty years after his review of Blue Velvet, Ebert said in an online chat that he was open to re-evaluating Lynch’s movie:
I still feel badly about how Rossellini wqs [sic] treated (and so does she, judging by her autobiography). But Lynch is a good director and I should re-visit the film.
He never did re-visit the film, at least not publicly. In 2010 he tweeted to Lynch directly:
