Director Lee Daniels followed the Oscar-winning Precious with The Paperboy in 2012. The critical backlash almost made him quit the industry, Daniels says.
Every so often, a film comes along that winds up as a bit of a lightning rod for critical anger; in recent years, the reactions to, say, David Robert Mitchell’s Under The Silver Lake (2018) and Damien Chazelle’s Babylon (2022) were polarising to say the least (though this writer rather loved them).
When it comes to unexpected vitriol, however, few films of the past 20 years come close to The Paperboy's Cannes reception in 2012. Although the southern fried thriller had its defenders when it debuted at the festival that May, the overwhelming reaction seemed to be of almost unbridled anger. After its screening finished, there followed around 16 minutes of both applause and “jeering, squawking and mooing,” according to The Daily Telegraph's Robbie Collin.
The grumpy reviews that followed its premiere were such that director Lee Daniels, who’d chosen the film as his follow-up to the Oscar-winning Precious (2009), almost gave up making movies entirely, he’s since admitted.
“That movie doesn’t get any love,” Daniels said in a new interview with IndieWire. “I was going to give up directing after that, because it was so trashed, and reviewers didn’t get the world.”
After making his directorial debut with the little-seen drama Shadowboxer in 2005, Daniels broke through with the acclaimed and financially successful Precious: Based On The Novel Push By Sapphire four years later. About the experiences of a 16 year-old Black teenager’s awful experiences in 1980s Harlem, Precious was nominated for six Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, and a Best Actress win for Mo’Nique, who played the title character’s nightmare of a mother.
With the possibilities opening up before him in the wake of that acclaim, Daniels decided he wanted to do something entirely different, and so he took on the task of adapting Pete Dexter’s 1960s Florida-set crime novel, The Paperboy.
“I felt like it was my Black version of my white version of The Paperboy,” Daniels said. “I was offered all these Black roles, Black jobs, Black films, and I was like, ‘No, I’m a fucking filmmaker. I’m not just a Black filmmaker. And I really want to work with white actors. How can you label me like this?’”
Daniels attracted an all-star cast, and everyone involved gamely threw themselves into the filmmaker’s unapologetically gaudy, febrile thriller: Matthew McConaughey plays Ward, a news reporter investigating the death of a sheriff; John Cusack is Hillary, the sleazy guy convicted (perhaps wrongly) for his murder; Nicole Kidman gives one of her best performances as Hillary’s fiancee, Charlotte. Then there’s Zac Efron as Ward’s brother and the titular paperboy who falls into Charlotte’s saucy orbit, while David Oyelowo is a dapper English journalist who works with Ward at The Miami Herald.
It’s a knotty plot, and loaded with moments seemingly designed to startle the unsuspecting – not least a much-discussed beach scene involving Efron, a jellyfish sting, and a urinating Kidman. It really is quite something.
Unfortunately, audiences didn’t flock to see The Paperboy in 2012, and Daniels was stung almost as badly by the reaction as Efron was by that jellyfish. “I love all of my work equally,” he said recently, “but the ones that were kicked to the curb are the ones that I hold dear to my heart.”
Fortunately, The Paperboy’s fate didn’t make Daniels quit the business, and he soon bounced back with, among other things, financially successful drama The Butler in 2013 and 2021’s The United States Vs Billie Holiday, which earned Andra Day a Best Actress nomination at the Academy Awards.
Most recently, Daniels has turned his hand to supernatural horror with The Deliverance, about a potential case of demonic possession in Pennsylvania. It’s set to stream on Netflix from the 30th August.
As for The Paperboy, it’s available to watch on AppleTV+ in the UK. We’d argue it’s well worth a watch.
