The Critic is a film that seems to start off as a serious-minded drama about a man whose position and prestige is threatened because of the unfair societal stigma placed on people like him in a less enlightened era and ends as a vaguely distasteful soap opera that might have been produced during that very same era to justify those very same attitudes, right down to a terrible and overly moralistic ending that anyone who has made any investment in the proceedings up to that point will find enraging. This is especially frustrating because amidst all the dubious plotting are a couple of interesting characters and performances deserving of a much better framework than they have been granted here.
Set in 1930s London, the film is centered around Jimmy Erskine (Ian McKellen), the most powerful and widely read theater critic in all of England whose words of praise can make plays into hits and unknown actors into stars and whose vicious takedowns can cause closing notices to be printed up the moment his review hits the newsstands. Perhaps not surprisingly, this power has gone to his head a bit and even when the owner of his paper dies and his replacement, son David (Mark Strong), declares that there will be have to be changes and belt-tightening and asks Jimmy to tone his rhetoric down, he figures that he is untouchable. Jimmy is also a homosexual—a definite no-no at that time—and when he is arrested one night in the park for violating so-called “decency laws,” David uses this as an excuse to fire him, effective in one month.
If this were today, of course, Jimmy would just start a Substack and a podcast but since those weren’t around back then, he decides to do whatever he can to get his job back. When he discovers that the married David has a thing for Nina Land (Gemma Arterton), an actress whose recent performances Jimmy has been savaging with particular virulence, he contacts her with a proposal—if she will get friendly (you know what I mean) with David, he will use his column to praise her to the skies. She does and he does but Jimmy has an ulterior motive up his sleeve and when he deploys it, the repercussions are severe and before long, new alliances are formed and broken as the body count shifts from the metaphorical to the literal.
The early scenes of The Critic are easily the best. Director Anand Tucker does a good job of establishing the period atmosphere and Patrick Marber’s screenplay, an adaptation of Anthony Quinn’s novel Curtain Call, demonstrates an amusingly acerbic sense of humor, especially in regards to the hilariously poisonous barbs that Jimmy delivers in his critiques. An intriguing additional wrinkle is added early on when Nina, who clearly has esteem issues and a need for validation, actually confronts Jimmy about his put downs regarding her performances. The subject of the odd and sometimes parasitic relationship between artists and critics is one that is definitely ripe for exploration and in McKellen and Arterton, The Critic has two performers who are more than up to the task of digging into it with both humor and honesty.
Unfortunately, it is at this point that the film turns away from the potentially provocative premise and instead shifts into a standard-issue narrative involving a love triangle, jealousy, betrayal and bloodshed. This is all stuff that we have seen many times before and Tucker and Marber fail to bring much of anything new to the material to give it any sort of distinction. More damaging, it effectively splits up the relationship between the McKellen and Arterton characters—the film’s greatest asset—and effectively pushes McKellen’s character to the sidelines for much of its middle section while also failing to make much use of the likes of Romola Garai and Lesley Manville, strong actresses who have been reduced to mere throwaway roles here. The film also suffers from a real clunker of an ending that plays like a reminded of the bad old days of moviemaking where the guidelines of the Motion Picture Production Code demanded that stories end with characters being punished for their misdeeds, even if such cappers were in direct opposition with the narrative that preceded them. I have no idea if this ending was part of the original novel or was an invention of Marber’s (though the reports that the film underwent some changes since premiering at last year’s Toronto film festival suggests the latter) but either way, it ends the story on such a bum note that it boggles the mind that anyone could have thought it made for a satisfactory ending.
A more troubling aspect of The Critic is the way that, even as it refuses to explore how homosexuals were treated in England in the Thirties as anything other than a plot device, it revives the vile stereotype of the malevolent gay character who seems to exist only to destroy the lives of all the seemingly happy straight characters who have the misfortune to encounter him. Back in the day when you couldn’t have openly gay characters and viewers had to read between the lines, this was bad enough but seen now, it comes across as particularly odious, especially since the character of Jimmy is given no real shading or depth to suggest what is driving him other than sheer malevolence, such as the desire to claim some form of power in an existence in which he is otherwise powerless. Again, having not read the original novel, I do not know if this is the result of Marber’s adaptation or if comes directly from the novel, though it should be noted that Marber’s last screenplay was for his adaptation of Notes on a Scandal, another story in which a LGBTQ character of a certain age acts in a seemingly sympathetic but ultimately predatory manner towards an unsuspecting straight character. I’m not saying that I see a patten emerging but if the trades soon announce that Marber will be scripting a remake of the infamous Windows, I will not be that surprised.
What makes The Critic so vexing is that it begins with such promise, only to devolve into an unconvincing and occasionally icky melodrama that feels as if it was exhumed from another era and perhaps should have been buried. This is a shame because, as I said, the early scenes are strong and the performances from McKellen and Arterton are convincing, even when the story around them disintegrates into a monotonous mess that contains a black heart but no spine to back it up. Considering the amount of talent involved here, even the most easy-to-please audience members will find this film to be a major disappointment.