The Critic review: Ian McKellen is too good for this overstuffed theatre critic drama

Gemma Arterton and Lesley Manville co-star in a film that fails to truly grapple with any of the interesting themes floating around Patrick Marber’s screenplay

No modern cultural commentator can be accused of bias when it comes to Anand Tucker’s The Critic. It’s set in the Thirties, a time in which work lunches were long and extravagant, city-living on a newspaper salary was easy, and actors and directors banged at your door seeking reappraisal. Today? Critics are only faced with disgruntled comic book fans with pocketfuls of slurs. None hold the same power or respect as they once did.

And The Critic – adapted by Notes on a Scandal’s Patrick Marber from a novel by former Independent film critic Anthony Quinn – is, ultimately, a story about power. I wouldn’t expect relatability in this case, but I do expect substance. Here, it’s largely absent. Ian McKellen luxuriates in the role of Jimmy Erskine, longtime theatre critic at The London Chronicle, whose position is threatened after the death of his former editor and mentor, who’s been replaced by his more conservative son, David Brooke (Mark Strong). To save his own skin, Jimmy manipulates the actor he’s always written about with disdain, Nina Land (Gemma Arterton), into a scheme that begins with blackmail and ends with murder.

It’s a darkly comic premise, making use of the old cinematic conceit of the critic as some kind of egotist puppet master, with little regard for mere mortal laws and moralities. When Nina’s mother, Annabel (Lesley Manville), tries to strike up a casual conversation with Jimmy, under the guise of an average theatregoer, he storms up to the manager and cries, “I must be protected from the general public!”

It’s a juicy part for McKellen, exactly the kind of legendary thespian who makes a barb about Nina seemingly not knowing how to walk sound like a three-course meal. But he also seems to be the only one who actually sees Jimmy as a person, and not merely a narrative device. Marber’s previous work, including the 2004 adaptation of his play Closer, indulged in terribly compromised people before. But he also seemed to care enough about his characters – it ensured we understood the boundaries of their psychic distress.

Jimmy is gay. His lover, Tom Tunner (Alfred Enoch), is also his live-in secretary. If any of this becomes too public, both his job and security are at risk. The whole world, too, seems as if it’s growing more cruel. On the streets, the fascist Blackshirts have grown bolder. The Critic, though, never really engages with the power dynamics at play here. It doesn’t sincerely grapple with Jimmy’s relationship with a much younger Black man in his direct employment, or that the tool he deploys against his enemies is a woman, or that gendered violence becomes a key point in the story. All we come to understand about Jimmy lies in McKellen’s smaller choices, in the delicate way he signals a shift in mood, in which a provocative smile might curdle into something closer to bitterness.

Two stars! Ian McKellen in the dreary slog ‘The Critic’ (Sean Gleason)

The rest is plain melodrama, amped up by the way cinematographer David Higgs turns London into a fog-choked proscenium, never quite real in its existence. David Brooke’s icy sister Cora (Romola Garai) and her portrait artist husband Stephen (Ben Barnes) weave their own secrets into the story, and the film slows to a crawl as it methodically unpacks each. None of it is quite as compelling as it needs to be. David begs of Jimmy, “tone it down… the unpleasantness, the extravagance”. The Critic would have benefited from the exact opposite.

Dir: Anand Tucker. Starring: Ian McKellen, Gemma Arterton, Mark Strong, Ben Barnes, Alfred Enoch, Romola Garai, Lesley Manville. 15, 95 mins.

‘The Critic’ is in cinemas from 13 September