The Critic — Anand Tucker

Any movie that features a theater critic as a main character invites more intentional criticism from even lay viewers through the mere recognition that the filmmakers are, in fact, actively cognizant about criticism as a practice and the importance of criticism in representing a baseline of intellectually engaged citizenry. It’s a meta-choice that draws attention to the meta part. Criticism is a practice more than a career or a special task that only some do. (And not all critics are actually critical, but that’s a discussion for another day.) To have a critic power an entire film, as is this case with Anand Tucker’s latest work The Critic, is a dangerous gamble. And it’s one that The Critic loses, too, by making no wise artistic observations but still drawing attention to the importance of such observations through its titular critic, lacking fulfilling characters, and having the audacity to call itself a thriller without ever managing to thrill. To quote the wise Gertrude Stein’s now ubiquitous phrase, “There is no there there.”

The critic here is more of a pompous and insufferable caricature than a thoughtful engager of dramatic media, though Ian McKellen as Jimmy Erskine does look like the kind of older newspaperman that one rarely and seldomly can still come across at a (film) critic screening in a major city — a drink of liquor near, well-read, keenly and not humbly aware of his fortunate occupation, and, as such, a relic of a bygone time. The position of “Chief Drama Critic” might alsGemma Artertono be extinct, a key indication of the film’s setting in the 1930s. Oh, and he’s gay. The gay (or effete) theater person is another overused trope in both cinema and literature, even if it’s relieving that Jimmy’s queerness here is actually important to the story rather than simply present in order to conform to reductive public perception for a person who appreciates the theater.

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