Grade: C-
It’s a mercurial film.
Starring Ian McKellen and Gemma Arterton, directed by Anand Tucker, and written by Patrick Marber, The Critic has so many stories that never become the story.
Ian McKellen is the film’s backbone. He plays Jimmy Erskine who’s the chief drama critic of The Daily Chronicle in London in 1934. He spends his nights dining dressed in dinner jackets at his private table at the theatre in between acts and he spends his days extracting new venom from the English language to throw on the performance he’s seen the previous night. Erskine actually knows a word derived from Ancient Greek meaning excessive cheek on the buttocks. He tries to use it in his latest review but is forced to change it to layman’s terms. In layman’s terms, the word is “fat assed.” Erskine’s life of journalistic luxury is threatened by the Chronicle’s new owner. Viscount David Brooke (Mark Strong) inherits the paper from his dead father and he pledges to make it the “most-read family newspaper in the country.” “Tone it down” he warns Erskine, and when the septuagenarian and literary Heathcliff disobeys, he’s given his notice and he’s reduced to, in his own words, having to work out how to live like a king on a pauper’s wages. Erskine plots to win his job back and offers actress Nina Land (Arterton) his unyielding favour and in exchange, she will become the bait in a honey trap to blackmail Brooke into restoring Erskine to his job.
Yet the marrow of this backbone of a plot is opaque. Erskine is a two-faced character. He advises Nina on how to overcome her insecurities over her acting skills and give a more authentic performance and his advice actually works, but he also plays the role of the Devil in their Faustian bargain. Ambiguity can be exciting but not when it is used in the evasive manner that Marber has used it in his script. Erskine justifies his actions by saying he’s defending his job like every poor working man in Depression-era London but also by telling his secretary Tom (Alfred Enoch) that the theatre “is life itself.” Is he an aristocrat falsely equating his interests with the working class like Charles Foster Kane or an aesthete willing to sacrifice anyone and anything to the art he loves like Dorian Gray? I’m not sure if Marber is trying to make him both or decided the first motive wasn’t right, changed it and forgot to go back and edit the rest of the script. He seems to have changed his mind on this score more than once. When Nina comes to Erskine guilt-ridden and drunk over the plot, he tells here that they are blameless because they did what they had to do, because there is no judgment and because there is no God. I was watching McKellen deliver his lines and thinking: just pick a story. Is this film about God, power, ambition or something else?
Below the plot, there are subplots that are more like sub-sub-sub plots. Tom’s complicity in Erskine’s scheme pricks his conscience and Nina is also having an affair with a married painter. Yet these storylines are given just enough time for Nina to tell the painter “I won’t be your mistress” and leave the painter at their café rendezvous site. They don’t receive enough screen time or thought to develop into anything gripping.
Marber starts and finishes his plotlines but does little work in between.
Tucker’s direction is just as indecisive as Marber’s writing. In one scene, Nina’s rehearsing for a Shakespeare play. Tucker looks down on her from a high angle but in an extreme close up. She’s on stage, sweating, hardly blinking or swallowing. The frustration and fear and humiliation she’s feeling as she struggles to become her character is made more intense by the camera’s proximity to her face. Then, Tucker goes and uses the same angle and shot size when Nina and Erskine are having a pleasant chat in Erskine’s sitting room and I thought: so, I was wrong about what you were trying to tell me when you did this before? Tucker’s style has a scrappy sense of unintended improvisation like Godard’s. The Critic looks like he was shooting it on the fly.
Fortunately, the cast aren’t hampered by the poor directing or writing. I haven’t seen Ian McKellen in a film since the last Hobbit in 2014, but he hasn’t lost a bit of his power and range. He can laugh like an old sleaze with Erskine’s fellow critics but also dampen his voice to a mellow and grandfatherly rhythm when talking to Nina. Gemma Arterton is beautifully chimeric. Her pouty glamour accents her performance no matter what it is, whether it’s drunken, innocent, or seductive. She looks across the supper table at Viscount Brooke, her eyes empty of anything but a gay light, her lips always looking like they’re ready to open to speak as kindly as a child or to welcome a hot kiss. When he asks if she’d like him to get the photo she’s come for, she says, with a flick that’s both heavy and serene, “You go, I’ll follow.” She’s a knockout and that she can be one when standing beside McKellen is a marvel. Both almost make the film worth seeing.
I emphasise almost. The Critic is not a must see but I didn’t leave the cinema totally disappointed. It’s a flibbertigibbet of a film but not a wholly unpleasant one.