The Critic
McKellen portrayed his character of a cold ambitious thug with an inborn zest for violence and robbery who is ambitiously prowling through the slums of London in The Good Liar but now has made himself even more repelling and is being a critic.
In the hit and miss thriller The Critic by Anand Tucker, who directed Hilary and Jackie, Jimmy Erskine, in 1930s London, is a much-dreaded and terribly popular theatre critic who however appears to reserve his most vicious gripes towards a leading lady who is just beginning to stand on her feet Nina Land (Gemma Arterton). He derives much gratification in a custom of tearing her apart, which has only deepened the scabs on her already ugly delirium. A homosexual in the contemporary world where loan laws are actively antagonistic to his very being, Jimmy epitomizes life at the knife edge, engaging in rough sex with men he meets in the park while writing boastful things about himself. However, the time comes when the owner of the newspaper passes away and Jimmy, now jester to the son Mark Strong, is warned to watch his tongue and keep out of dissatisfaction with the new owner, and as if the security of the job could not get worse, he has to beg for the help of Nina.
The Critic marks Patrick Marber’s return to screenwriting after Notes on a Scandal in 2006 which is the first since then. A warm welcome back is given to a writer, so long absent, who does not flinch from sending up the most horrible impulses in human beings. The Critic’s writing is on par with Jimmy’s. Whereas the Critic may seem somewhat mild in comparison to the other scripts, it is only because they went so much harder than one would expect and the much sharper claws of the writer are on full display here. The phrases used to critique Nina’s talent (“one wet blanket or damp squib exchanged for another”) elicit howls of laughter and one cannot help but picture what kind of drunken revelry is going on in order to accompany the unsavory self aggrandizing egotist played by McKellen who is stumbling about the west end with a handsome man and a notebook in hand.
The interaction between an artist and a critic has not been given due attention and Marber does not take the easy route of psychology with one smart, and complimentary speech explaining the void, yet, one feels in such situations when one claims to love the art more even though harassing the performer in such a way that elicitation of emotions towards the performance necessarily entails some form of indenture. But what is the extent of this indulgence and how much enjoyment is to be derived as a result of this indulgence in pushing the boundaries? The questions being raised are interesting enough, and they do prod at least in some fashion at a craving that Jimmy has for violent versions of sex, and on Nina a quest for recognition by the society, and perhaps even do not require such straight responses by the film, but are at least given some time to a gaze. Too soon the earlier and more sharp-edged dark satire is put on hold and substituted by a rather traditional crime thriller narrative with themes of sexual ‘betrayal’ and a plot so thin that it becomes difficult to care about what happens next. As the pile of corpses continues to expand, one may well find that attention and interest is denied to the far more intriguing threat of receiving an unfavorable review instead.
It’s true that, barring McKellen, the fizz of the first half may not go completely flat in the second but that’s because of him, who enjoys yet another wicked role to work on, that the court seems to minimal in the shade of pompous distortion of this actor, who munches on each scene, this deliciously caustic turn would guarantee him nothing but the finest notices. And although it is good to see Arterton holding her own against him, an actress destined for even greater success the farther away she gets from her monolithic days, the film does both Romola Garai (who is utterly repulsive for a few moments) and the brilliant Lesley Manville as Nina’s mother, who in mere minutes of her few scenes (all of which she nails, of course, including her frenetic search for a compliment when Arterton asks for her post show impression and calls her performance “audible”) is utterly superb.
Whatever the intrinsic problems of violence in the most recent Marber film perspective nearer to that of violence being what we face than what it suffers has a bottomless failure even though the screenwriter has some ideas and captures some laughs. The Critic becomes even more entertaining because rather than sticks and stones, it is words that do the damage.
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