The Critic (15) |Close-Up Film Review
Cast: Ian McKellen, Gemma Arterton, Mark Strong,
Review by Carol Allen
McKellan not surprisingly dominates the film, as Erskine does the theatre world of the period. He is a vicious and stylish delight whenever he is on screen. Jimmy’s world however is threatened when the owner of the paper he writes for dies and his son David Brooke (Mark Strong) plans to turn The London Chronicle into a family values promoting organ. Jimmy must cut out his infamous gay antics with young strangers in the park and tone down his drinking and the viciousness of his reviews – or else.
One of the targets of those reviews is insecure young actress Nina Land (Gemma Arterton), whose performance in The Duchess of Malfi Jimmy cruelly destroys in his review. We see too little of her performance in that role to judge but a clue is given when she asks for feedback from her adoring mum (Lesley Manville) and the best mum can manage is “You were very audible.” However that scathing review could prove to be Jimmy’s undoing, as he realises when he discovers that the new boss has a big crush on her. So he befriends Nina, who turns out to be his greatest fan – an interesting relationship that – and promises to support her career if she will do him a favour – sleep with his boss, so Jimmy can blackmail him.
There are some very good things about Patrick Marber’s script and Anand Tucker’s direction, in addition to McKellan’s performance. The other actors, particularly Arterton and Alfred Enoch as Tom, Jimmy’s live in ”secretary”, are good, the film has a luscious sense of the period and there are lots of theatre references, if you’re into that sort of thing. One of the most powerful sequences in terms of social comment shows a more sympathetic side of Jimmy, when he stands up for Tom, who is black, against some Mosley blackshirt types and is then bullied by the police for being gay. It’s around then that the story takes a darker tone.
When the film was shown at the Toronto Film Festival the reception however was somewhat cool, and since then the team has done a pretty drastic re-edit of the last part of the film, also inserting some new scenes. As a result the last third gets rather unnecessarily complicated and confusing. Romola Garai has a couple of scenes as David’s tough daughter; her husband (Ben Barnes), the artist seen painting Jimmy earlier, turns out to also be lusting after Nina; and we discover that David has a tragic sick wife in the background (Claire Skinner, very briefly seen). Plus there’s the disappearance of Nina to be solved and a dark resolution of Jimmy’s story – all done in a somewhat bewildering rush. However despite those reservations, the film is well worth seeing for McKellan and Alderton alone.
