Ian McKellen and Gemma Arterton star in The Critic, in which a powerful London theatre critic becomes entangled in a web of deceit and murder. Photo: Supplied.
The opening frame of The Critic is riveting as the words spoken hold your attention, even though the setting is London, 1934. “I have a deadline. The drama critic is feared and reviled for the judgment he must bring, but the truth is imperative, a critic must be cold and perfectly alone.”
An obnoxious theatre critic’s determination to keep his job and hedonistic lifestyle leads to a twisted web of deceit, duplicity, blackmail and murder in The Critic, where ambition seduces and power corrupts.
Jimmy Erskine (played with exceptional competence by Ian McKellen, The Lord of the Rings, The Good Liar, Richard III) is the most famous, and feared, theatre critic of the age. He’s an influencer, one who holds considerable sway and has the power to make or break careers. He has worked for The Daily Chronicle for more than four decades.
He savagely takes down any actor unfortunate enough to displease him. He is especially harsh with Nina Land (Gemma Arterton, Quantum of Solace, The King’s Man), a budding leading lady who has long idolised Erskine.
Erskine is openly gay at a time when homosexual relations were against the law in the United Kingdom. He lives as flamboyantly as he writes, parties into the night, has encounters in the park and cohabits with his much younger ‘‘secretary’’ Tom Turner (Alfie Enoch, Harry Potter film series).
When his newspaper’s proprietor dies and his son Viscount David Brooke (Mark Strong, Cruella, Shazam!) takes over, Erskine is told to tone it down, to avoid flouting the paper’s new family values. When his job security is threatened, he hatches a devious plan, setting off a chain of events with terrible consequences. Jimmy doesn’t comfortably fit in with Brooke’s new vision. His colourful behaviour and outspoken manner soon land him in trouble. In particular, Brooke is infuriated by Jimmy’s cruel review of leading lady Land, who has given her life to her steady, but not stellar, career.
Nina feels that without Erskine’s approval it’s hard to make it, so in desperation, she confronts him with her fury and frustration.
“You write so tenderly and passionately about the actors who move you. Yet you dismiss those who disappoint you so ruthlessly, as if you’ve been betrayed.”
He assures her there is art in her; she just needs to draw it out.
Erskine ignores a final warning from Brooke. After being picked up by the police for drunken, unruly behaviour – to his horror – he is fired with one month’s notice. When Erskine has an opportunity to regain his job, he hatches a dishonest blackmail scheme with Land. He writes her a glowing review, but it comes at a price.
Erskine’s struggle for survival, his voice, his identity and his story is incredibly dark, surprising and moving. As Erskine, McKellen is eloquent and delightfully irascible. Using satirical oratory, he draws on his personal experience as he had ”come out” as gay in 1988. A British actor of great versatility, a noted gay rights activist, McKellen, 85, was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1979 and was knighted in 1991.
Director Anand Tucker makes an aptly cogent point when he says The Critic is an astonishingly contemporary piece of work speaking directly to our time and condition.
“Set in the 1930s, a period of similar febrile upheaval and intensity to our present, with old certainties falling away, and the rise of the right and its instinct-based politics triumphing over rationalism and science, it is the story of an outsider trapped in the vice of events bigger than himself,” Tucker says.
“Yet it is a much bigger and more elemental story than just politics. It asks questions of the nature of art and creativity, of ambition and desire. It has at its heart a thrillingly dark Faustian pact, a beautifully interconnected web of relationships that explode as a result of that pact and ends as a meditation on the entire experience of being human, with all our flaws, our terrible choices and their consequences on display.”
He brings Patrick Marber’s script to life in the most immediate and visceral way possible. He delivers on the period promise. It’s a look and feel that’s real, not glossy, polished and polite.
Based on Curtain Call by Anthony Quinn, The Critic is an engaging, tangled whodunnit wrapped in a Faustian pact of ambition, desire, a deadly web of blackmail and betrayal – with a refulgent anti-hero at its dark heart!
The Critic, directed by Anand Tucker and distributed by Transmission Films, is now streaming.
Original Article published by Rama Gaind on Region Canberra.
