Channelling something of his big-screen Richard III from almost 30 years ago, Ian McKellen now portrays an ageing chancer with reptilian contempt for every single person he comes across. And incidentally, no one keeps an unfiltered cigarette in the corner of his mouth with more style than McKellen. His character is a critic, and therefore arrogant, spiteful, bad mannered and unpleasant – and who moreover abandons his much-vaunted integrity and objectivity when it suits him, to salvage his career. (Erm, is this a documentary?)
Screenwriter Patrick Marber freely adapts the page-turning bestseller Curtain Call by author and critic Anthony Quinn and Anand Tucker directs. McKellen plays Jimmy Erskine, a cantankerous and much feared theatre critic in 1930s London whose open-secret nocturnal encounters in public parks with young men are beginning to discomfit his proprietor Viscount Brooke (Mark Strong), who pompously announces his determination to make his publication Britain’s foremost “family newspaper”.
Erskine has an array of robust opinions about the theatre of the day, but Marber refrains, perhaps because it would be too obvious, from giving Erskine some smirking comments on young West End star John Gielgud, who was famously to be caught for an indiscretion of Erskine’s sort 20 years later, in the 1950s. Instead, Erskine obsessively gives cruel and terrible notices to leading lady Nina Land (Gemma Arterton), whose mum Annabel (Lesley Manville) is worried about her; Nina is having an affair with Viscount Brooke’s son-in-law, fashionable portrait painter Stephen Wyley (Ben Barnes) whose wife Cora (Romola Garai) is an icy antisemite, in tune with the upper classes’ Mosleyite mood. Meanwhile Brooke himself neglects his wife Mary (Claire Skinner) because he has a gloomy tendresse for Nina, which Erskine sees how he can exploit. Just about the only good person in this gallery of rogues is Jimmy’s long-suffering amanuensis Tom (Alfred Enoch), a black man whom Jimmy actually defends against the swaggering racist blackshirts in the street – a rare moment of decency on his part.
It’s a strange adaptation in some ways: Marber changes Quinn’s original plot, keeping the characters but removing a storyline about a serial killer, and reassigning the villainy — on a less obviously violent level — elsewhere. He actually makes Erskine much nastier than in the book, removing much of the lovability from the lovable monster. Yet the film has an odd teatime glow of cosy-crime sentimentality which deadens the effect, and this period drama can’t quite bring itself to show that, in the 1930s, murder was punishable by death. But McKellen overrides these concerns; his glorious star quality and dash make him the only possible casting. His importance is critical.
• The Critic is in UK and Irish cinemas from 13 September, and in Australian cinemas from 3 October.
