The Critic is a period drama starring Ian McKellen as a newspaper theatre critic famed for his savagery and it did sound as if it had all the makings of an entertaining and nicely savage little film. But through a surfeit of plot, it rather loses the plot, and the result is a surprisingly bland melodrama with the small-screen feel of one of those Agatha Christies the BBC forces upon us every Christmas.
When is anyone going to properly appreciate what we critics go through?
It’s a pity, as critics don’t often make it on to the cinema screen, unlike war reporters. War reporters, war reporters, why is it always war reporters when I have to sit through a film each week that may be boring? When is anyone going to properly appreciate what we go through?
This is loosely based on Anthony Quinn’s novel, Curtain Call, and is directed by Anand Tucker from a screenplay by Patrick Marber. It’s set in London in the 1930s with McKellen playing Jimmy Erskine, who is the drama critic for the Daily Chronicle. He is a figure like James Agate (the inspiration for Curtain Call) or Kenneth Tynan as he can make or break a production even if his prose, from what we see of it, does seem plain unpleasant rather than either especially witty or insightful. (‘Hold your breath as you pass the Duke of York’s for here is untreated theatrical sewage,’ begins one of his reviews.)
But now the proprietor, Lord Something-Or-Other, has died and his son (Mark Strong) is in the driving seat. He wants to create a kinder newspaper and needs to make economies but Jimmy, who is arrogant and vain, is sure his job is safe. ‘They won’t come after the old guard,’ he tells the opera critic as they get sloshed over lunch at their club. ‘We are the bloody paper… I’ve been with this festering organ for 40 years!’ Jimmy, who is as openly gay as is possible when you could be slung into jail, lives with Tom (Alfred Enoch), his secretary who is also his lover, but his ‘proclivities’ catch up with him when he is arrested one night. Next thing he knows, he’s been sacked.
Will he take that lying down? He will not. His co-conspirator is Nina Land (Gemma Arterton), a young actress whose performance in The White Devil he’d trashed. She had pursued him for an explanation and a friendship of sorts ensued. He comes up with an idea to save both their careers and she’s forced to agree to this Faustian pact or she will be professionally destroyed. It requires her to do something so demeaning and awful and beyond the pale that I fell out with Jimmy in quite a big way. Had he tumbled from the stalls directly on to a spike, say, I would not have been bothered. I may even have applauded. I didn’t know what the film expected of me from here on in. Was I meant to care? This does have a surfeit of plot – Blackmail! Murder! Suicide! – while homophobia is rife as Oswald Mosley’s black shirts prowl and there’s also the distraction of many famous faces popping up momentarily (Lesley Manville, Romola Garai, Claire Skinner). It is certainly deeply acted. McKellen, in particular, deeply acts his socks off but it’s not deeply felt and it fails to engender any deep engagement.
This is principally the McKellen show and perhaps because of that Tucker does not attempt to put any personality elsewhere. A good film about a hateful critic has therefore yet to be made. Do you have any idea what it’s like to be hateful about Marvel week after week until you are banned from reviewing them? There must be a trilogy in that.
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