The Critic
Once in London, an actress sat next to me at a wedding reception. Interspersed with the theatrical tones cheapened during her time at RADA, she was able to use effective projection to reach the back rows of the audience. “You do understand,” she seemed to deliver this line straight out of a Coward play, “that the AC tor considers a crrrritic similar to how a dog considers a fire hydrant.” I explained to her that in such instances, my last observation recommended pop star fans to stay away from his latest egocentric activity. “Oh, well,” she uttered mildly, “if that is how you want to appeal to my feelings.”
However, even a critic understands the situation from the actor’s standpoint. He knows that these people go through years and years of practice, training, and even rejection, making them so exposed to create efficacy in their presence, only to be labelled with phrases like “over the top” or “uninspired” in passing. This is also the reason why quite unflattering images of critics are shown in movies and actors get great pleasure from getting even with them.
Recall the tongue-in-cheek and wolfish figure of Addison DeWitt, portrayed by George Sanders in “All About Eve,” and the quite telling and cruel character of a food critic named Anton Ego in ‘Ratatouille.’ A famous episode of “Citizen Kane” depicts the titular figure completing and hurling a negative review of his wife’s singing to the face of the critic who was his best friend at that time, as the latter becomes too drunk to sustain the argument. ‘Critic’s Choice,’ the movie starring Bob Hope, features him as a man who critiques his own wife’s biographical play. It was in this work that the viewer had a chance to see how David Niven would have created a critic who would never be in the frame the one portrayed in “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies”. He became fascinated by the sparkly show business and began to focus on being funny rather than being and doing something that matters until he is brought back to earth by both his wife and best friend.
It is Ian McKellen’s character who, in the “The Critic,” makes a point to pull together everything that makes those types of critics stereotypical characters. The worst bits. Deepened by personal flaws, these characters also possess one interesting ability to be engaged in satirical observations without falling into u835 excessive character malice. Erskine crossed that line decades ago.
It is the 30s, and time has come for Erskine to shine as a newspaper theater critic, and this has happened on a number of occasions to this journalist and columnist.
He enjoys the satisfaction of being in a position where he is capable of determining the rise or fall of a performer or a production while also enjoying the limelight. Watching and reviewing plays are, for him, activities interspersed between drinking, smoking and harassment of young men who are paid for the few minutes they spend “roughing” him up. This is as much sexual for him as it is the “humiliation and danger” aspects of it all. And so it is as the narrative progresses, the newspaper owner who employed him has since passed away and the son of this man Richard Brooke now played by Mark Strong is making changes.
“The Critic” is worth seeing mainly because of McKellen. This remarkable actor can not hope for a better suited role which would appeal to his understanding and traumatic experiences. The tilt of his head, the slouch of his shoulders, the angle of the hat he is wearing and the iconic way he holds a cigarette while dragging it across his lip all these display who Erskine is, what is dear to him and how he intends to reclaim what is rightfully his. His encounters with his co-workers and friends, the secretary and lover, a black young man (Alfred Enoch), and his rather mild tension argument with an editor and Brooke are very credible. McKellen, however, has been able to bring out the most relaxed side of Erskine an average British, that is always uncomfortable, always vulnerable and horrible. Lesley Manville as Nina Land, a promising actress that was even more frightened in the film because of her unkind mother, and Gemma Arterton for the mother were also outstanding even with poorly drawn characters.
The other factor that draws us into the narrative is the world-building done by production designer Lucienne Suren.
The film exhibits exquisite spaces and settings including the household of Erskine, and of Cora, the daughter of Brooke (Romola Garai) and her Jewish husband Stephen (Ben Barnes), an artist opera singer, a newspaper office, as well as a bistro visited by the characters. All such spaces are beautifully designed and constructed, classic and peek in the past times. There are proper old solid pieces that have been well cared for and are well lit, with a few modernist accents thrown in to acknowledge the evolving styling and a consequential change that is bound to affect every aspect of English society. This is England between the two World Wars, with tips of a fascist politician and nasty Blackshirt thugs and proceeding as if nothing is out of order, the England of the past with sophistication of the twelfth century touching close. This Cira is also captured in the film through the chaotic juxtaposition of Brook and Erskine’s fights that flank these abstractive first signs, and prepare us for a narrative about the understated self importance that critics rather insist on ignoring in their practice as journalists as Vide
Of course not, the movie wastes no time going from set up to making an unnecessary chaotic story that we feel Erskine would not endorse.
Brooke advises Erskine that public shaming will lead to his termination. Nevertheless, Erskine does not back down from taking chances with the men who come to the park. When he is apprehended, Brooke is pleased that she had the chance to part ways with him. Erskine is desperate to be reinstated, and he believes the defenseless Nina Land can be useful in achieving this. The inevitable events that follow are constructed on the flimsiest, unconvincing, and implausible of plots. The expectation is that in a city of such a large size, all of the characters would not be linked in such a bizarrely tight knit circle. From this point onward, the cupid directed film, degenerates into a love story promising shocking events but only resulting in the beginning of a series of events with circumstances that come to look clearly more and more bleak. In place of this oh surprise, they take us further away from the captivating first half to making one understand that ‘stale’ and ‘over the top’ are the correct descriptors.
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