By Jake Wilson
THE CRITIC ★★½
(M) 101 minutes
In the eyes of many, a critic is someone who makes a living being as horrid as possible. Whether that’s altogether fair, Anand Tucker’s intermittently entertaining The Critic does nothing to challenge the stereotype. As the powerful, pampered theatre critic Jimmy Erskine, Ian McKellen looks and sounds like a villain in a Disney fairy tale, with permanently narrowed eyes and a voice that goes from trilling malice to a cold rasp of fury.
In The Critic, Ian McKellan plays Jimmy Erskine, who looks and sounds like a villain in a Disney fairy tale.
We’re in 1930s London, where for many years Erskine has attended opening nights on behalf of the fictitious Morning Chronicle (he’s old enough to have known Oscar Wilde, or at least to have seen the great man passing by). Judging from the extracts we’re given, his reviews aren’t notable for wit or insight, but he certainly has a talent for abuse: he’s fond of words such as “callipygous,” which he glosses as “fat-arsed”.
Even as he pronounces severe judgments from on high, Erskine’s employers are starting to have qualms about him, especially his habit of picking up rough trade after dark (the Chronicle, under new management, is a “family paper”). With his job on the line he’s willing to do whatever it takes to save his skin, even compromise the critical standards he claims to hold dear.
Gemma Arterton plays Nina Land, a rising West End star who strikes a deal with Ian McKellen’s theatre critic Jimmy Erskine.
It’s a promising starting point for a sordid yet cosy British melodrama full of well-spoken people behaving badly – the kind of thing expected of screenwriter Patrick Marber, who was nominated for an Oscar for Notes on a Scandal. But The Critic never quite comes together: there’s something wonky about the structure, as if Marber had given up halfway on the challenge of reshaping his source material, Anthony Quinn’s 2015 novel Curtain Call.
In the novel, Erskine is a supporting character, whereas in the film he commands our attention almost to the exclusion of anyone else. Still, strictly speaking, he’s peripheral to large portions of the plot, which otherwise follows the struggles of Nina Land (Gemma Arterton), a rising West End star caught between two tediously well-meaning admirers (Ben Barnes and Mark Strong).
Nina and Erskine do eventually form a kind of alliance – but even then, the oddly muffled climax makes it difficult to gauge what the film might be trying to say about art, criticism and the relationship between them. While Erskine counsels Nina that in the theatre less is more, he doesn’t apply the same principle to his fancy prose. Nor do the filmmakers appear to have taken the sentiment to heart, going by McKellen’s all-stops-out performance, not to mention Marber’s fondness for carefully placed obscenities and Tucker’s for overbearing close-ups.
Unclear, too, is what we’re finally meant to feel about Erskine, a bully on the page but also oppressed in turn. Is he a villain first and foremost, or someone worthy of our pity, even a degree of respect? Personally, I find McKellen’s showboating easier to take the more he sticks to being a nasty piece of work – but being a critic, I suppose I would say that.
The Critic is released in cinemas on October 3.
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