The Critic

London, 1934. The Daily Chronicle’s acid tongued theatre critic torments a popular but cripplingly insecure actress via a sequence of cheerfully vitriolic reviews. He is Ian McKellen, she is Gemma Arterton. Together, they elevate an otherwise middling effort from Leap Year director Anand Tucker.

They, and a clutch of tremendously catty barbs in a script from Patrick Marber, making his long overdue return to cinema. Where The Critic boasts strength in the line, however, the wider whole hasn’t half the zest and flavour. 

Jimmy Erskine is not just a theatre critic. Blessed with a verbose gift for vocabulary, Erskine is a four-decade serving stalwart of the Chronicle and favourite of its rampantly right-wing editor. Moreover, Erskine is also a raging and unabashed homosexual at a time when to be such was to be a criminal of the first order. Not that this fazes the great writer himself. Not in the least. Indeed, Erskine’s apparent indifference affords him the luxury of living with his lover

and secretary – Tom (Alfred Enoch), while seasoning their relationship with regular sex from a park prostitute. Erskine is known for liking it ‘rough’.

It’s not entirely clear why Erskine takes so fervently against Arterton’s Nina Land, whose stage presence neither seems to warrant either the popular adoration nor critical lambaste. For her part, Nina has concern only for Erskine’s judgement. It was reading his musings on the art of theatre that first inspired Nina to perform, after all. In the here and now, however, there is no longer joy for Nina in such reading. ‘Over the last ten years,’ she bemoans, ‘you’ve compared me to livestock, creatures of the sea and an extinct bird’. This, in the wake of a particularly grisly hatchet job, in which Erskine derides Nina as being a ‘wet blanket’ with a ‘fat arse’.

is in excavating the relationship between star and critic that Tucker finds his film at its most compelling. Nina’s desperate need to please intensifies with each new review but negativity from the Chronicle appears to have little bearing on her commercial success and the flow of roles ferried her way. In consulting Erskine – itself a curious manifestation of a conversation that rarely occurs in real life – Nina learns of the root of his negativity. Erskine does not, ostensibly, dislike Nina but experiences profound disappointment each time she fails to meet his exacting expectations. Woe betide those who fall short of Erskine’s image of a very particular little England.

And yet, in probing this dichotomy, The Critic itself disappoints. Too soon, opened questions are abandoned. There is an understanding here that actors crave the critic’s approval but untouched is the reverse of the dichotomy. Why does Jimmy write? Is it pure pleasure or revenge for the career he could not sustain.

Unfazed, McKellen maintains his share of the fizz throughout, devouring the dramaturgical opportunity to embrace Erskine’s increasingly malodorous inclinations. Arterton, too, flourishes with performative ostentation as Nina falls into accelerating despair. Tucker has less fortune in capitalising on the potential of his wider ensemble, with Lesley Manville, Romola Garai and Mark Strong all underused. To that end, his is a two-hander that transitions to chamber piece without really getting to the nub of either