Too many of the hopeless dunderheads who make films, write novels and devise plays enjoy taking cheap swipes at selfless professionals in the critical trenches. No community is more traduced than the brave reviewer. It’s pathetic.
I’m joking, of course. Indeed, more than a few critics savour the glamorous executioners they become in films set around the theatre world in particular. There is nobody quite so witty or astute in All About Eve as the malign Addison DeWitt. “My native habitat is the theatre,” he says. “In it, I toil not, neither do I spin.” The astrakhan coat alone is to die for.
All of which is by way of introducing Ian McKellen as Jimmy Erskine. Anand Tucker’s The Critic is an uneven affair. It begins as a convincing study of West End discontents during the interwar years. One feels the chatty atmosphere of the crush bar. Once senses the frustrated ambitions of those to whom the notices do no favour. The opening salvo, from a novel by Anthony Quinn, could just about pass as a lesser work of Noël Coward. In its second half, sadly, The Critic spins off into murderous melodrama that might cause even the Jacobeans to test the fainting couch.
But the actors, and McKellen in particular, just about hold it together. No contemporary could roll these insults around a tongue with such after-dinner relish. Erskine, critic for a paper that, the script clarifies, is not exactly the Daily Mail, reminds us of a time when those reviewing were an extension of the theatrical community. The actors cannot compete with Erskine’s taste for a grand entrance or a dismissive exit.
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Patrick Marber, in his first screenplay since Notes from a Scandal, from 2006, points up a few chilling similarities with our current media landscape. Times are hard and the Daily Chronicle, Erskine’s paper, is seeking to lay off the lame ducks. A lion of Shaftesbury Avenue, Erskine feels himself safe from the axe. So much so that he ignores requests to tone down the savagery – “More beauty, less beast” – and launches, with increased relish, into the career of faltering star Nina Land (Gemma Arterton). It transpires that Viscount Brooke, owner of the Chronicle, has a barely suppressed passion for the actor.
There are other complications. Erskine is gay in a city still largely hostile to that community. (Nearly two decades after the events depicted, John Gielgud, in the same year he was knighted, was arrested for “importuning male persons for immoral purposes”.)
There are strong characters and crafty performances here. One might assume the aristocratic owner of a right-wing paper to be a bad ’un, but Strong, always an actor to find unexpected angles in a role, draws poignancy from a love-torn introvert trying to make something less ghastly of his father’s legacy. Arterton is perfectly cast as a strong women glued down by one critic’s too-enthusiastic taste for the jugular. “It’s going to stop!” she says on encountering Erskine. “Oooo! Are you retiring?” he throws back with much faux enthusiasm.
Unfortunately there are too many clunky period signifiers – the British Union of Fascists pins on police officers’ lapels, for instance – and, late on, a fatal surrender to penny-dreadful improbabilities. For a large part of the yarn, Erskine does, at least, seem to exercise professional integrity, but, given the slightest opportunity to sell himself out, he does so without an apparent qualm. That makes him a significantly less interesting personality.
By the close, one is left befuddled. Is this a tragedy? Is this a comedy? Is it a moral fable? Cruelty to Homo criticus is the least of its problems.
