To the cinema once again, dear readers, and the latest motion picture from Mr Anand Tucker, which proves to be a modestly engaging little contrivance which might rank as a perfectly passable period potboiler were it not for the occasional sense that it might be pretending to profundity. One is always grateful for the film industry to step away from the wearyingly familiar from time to time, and amidst the mostly unremarkable summer attractions for the massed audiences, any offering that is not aimed primarily at easily distracted simpletons is to be seized upon immediately.
Jimmy Erskine is The Critic of the title, the Daily Chronicle's longstanding reviewer of the legitimate theatre and columnist of greasepaint gossip. He is, one must acknowledge, not a particularly pleasant fellow: too fond of the alcohol and certain other vices which, let us merely hint, are still against the law in 1934. He is also too cheerfully addicted to the vituperative vitriol of the reviewer's art: regularly denigrating the hapless thespians' nightly efforts with an almost childishly sadistic glee. Faced with the Chronicle's new owner, a man unwilling to subsidise his sybaritic lifestyle, Erskine concocts a fiendish plot against him, with the assistance of an actress whose performances he has viciously abused in print. Inevitably, however, his machinations must fail...
Erskine is a gift of a role for Mr Ian McKellen, an actor always worth watching both for moments of quiet, intimate subtlety or declamatory grandstanding, and here he does get to play to the close camera as well as the gallery. I must confess at this point that I yield to no-one in my ambivalence towards Ms Gemma Arterton, an actress whose work for some unfathomable reason has never particularly appealed to me, be it the schoolyard shenanigans of St Trinians or the cavorting around South America with James Bond (although in all fairness I was a great admirer of Byzantium); but here she does have the difficult task of playing a not-very-good actress, which I should say she accomplishes. She does well to differentiate between the "real" Nina and the "stage" Nina, though on at least one occasion she is aided by the production in which she is appearing being a clearly unspeakable disaster.
Having said all this, at least in its current form (following reshooting that substantially restructured the story) The Critic is a reasonably enjoyable yarn: sombre though not without humour, with excellent attention to period detail, a mixture of the glamorous and the grubby, as well as an insight into the nature and function of the critic (and whether he can create his own drama rather than merely report on others'). It is scarcely one of the greats - for one thing there are a few too many handy connections between the characters - but it is a mostly solid and well mounted melodrama that takes perhaps too much care to never really catch fire. Ultimately, however, it is Mr McKellen's show and, whether he's being mischievous, bitter or conspiratorial, you can not take your eyes off him. One wonders what Jimmy Erskine would think of it: for my mere part, dear readers, I commend it to the house, albeit with reservations, and exit with a flourish, stage left.
***
No comments:
Post a Comment