Everyman
I am experiencing some inveiglement to pen a grandiloquent, euphuistic analysis of this motion picture and saturate it with verbose sesquipedalianisms. Quis reprehendit Criticus? as Tacitus might have put it.The Critic is, as the name suggests, a film about a critic. James Erskine, (Ian McKellen), is chief drama critic of the Chronicle newspaper, and much given to over-written reviews. When his editor objects to his use of a long Greek word meaning "having or pertaining to large buttocks" he changes it to "fat-arsed".
McKellen is of course absolutely wonderful, and the part could have been, and possibly was, written specially for him. A theatrical gay man who once met Oscar; knowledgeable about classical drama; widely read and feared by the acting profession for his vitriol: there are moments where you can imagine him sitting in a box heckling Fozzie Bear. It is 1934; the era where the Theatre and the Press still mattered. The evocation of the newspaper and the club and the West End very nearly brought me out in a full scale bout of fernweh, not to say hireath. We bloggists are, after all, the direct linear descendents of these hot-metal hacks even though theirs was an age of gold and ours is an age of brass. (I've always hankered for a friend to inherit a silver mine and put me in charge of dramatic criticism.)
Erskine is clearly a miserable old git, but those of us who get called "neckbeards" and "gatekeepers" if we are critical of -- say -- a fantasy TV show are mostly on his side. Whether its Norm Fletcher or Cyrano de Bergerac, we all love a witty underdog. "Replace damp squib with wet blanket," indeed.
So: a witty film about the relationship between artist and critic; with "it's only a model" shots of foggy London, wood panelled offices and opulent hotel rooms? Erskine has taken against actress Nina Land (Gemma Arteton) and gives her comedically stinking reviews. (Her theatrical mother (Lesley Manville) praises her performance in the White Devil for its "audibility".) So Nina confronts Erskine, and it all becomes a little more complicated. Erskine genuinely loves the theatre. He's a failed actor himself and can't forgive performers who don't give of their best. Nina, on the other hand, fell in love with the stage because she grew up reading Erskine's reviews. Additional wrinkles arrive thick and fast: the secret admirer who sends Nina flowers every night is the owner of Erksine's newspaper, whose son-in-law she is also having an affair with.
It's all rather jolly and cosy in slightly horrid way: but when Erskine is fired for soliciting "rough trade" outside a men's public lavatory, the film takes an extreme right turn from "moderately dark period comedy" into "melodramatic thriller"; Ian McKellen's sympathetically miserable old git is gradually revealed as an out-and-out monster. Is the idea that we're peeling layers off a theatrical onion: first, a nasty man who ruins careers with his reviews; then, a frustrated actor who honestly wants to promote good taste; then a damaged gay man who deliberately puts himself in danger in a homophobic society and finally -- well, spoiler alert, but he finally turns out to be really not very nice at all. Apparently the film's original ending, changed after adverse audience reactions, was even darker. Erskine's kind-of-boyfriend [Alfred Enoch] is black, but the only racists in 1930s London conveniently wear Blackshirt uniforms. And everyone apart from the police is indulgently tolerant of his 'tastes' and 'proclivities'.
Maybe the mind-games were intentional: cast a much-loved actor as a horrible character; make us love the horrible character; and then show us just how horrible he can be. I didn't entirely buy it. And I think I would rather have had a more believable ninety minutes of front and back stage bitchery and newsroom vitriol. But Sir Ian himself is absolutely priceless.
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