Jed Perl at the NYRB:
Complaints about the state of criticism are a very old story. But nothing I’ve read—from indictments published decades ago by Cyril Connolly, Elizabeth Hardwick, Clement Greenberg, and Gore Vidal to James Wolcott’s evisceration of cultural coverage at The New York Times in a recent issue of Liberties—can top Ian McKellen’s howl for what we’ve lost, telegraphed through every twist and turn of his performance as the curmudgeonly theater critic Jimmy Erskine in The Critic (2023).
Erskine is no saint. He’s a nasty man. His judgments are belligerently hyperbolic. He turns out to be a blackmailer and a murderer. Nevertheless, I can’t help but see a critique of the hopelessly routinized state of criticism today in McKellen’s turn as a cultivated and abrasive Brit doing battle with newspapers that already in the 1930s, when the movie is set, were replacing criticism with something closer to bland reportage. As he plays Erskine—based on James Agate, a major figure in London before World War II—his manic appetite for gossip, skulduggery, sexual games, and downright dishonesty is all part of some essential commitment to the dramatic arts. Exaggeration is his everyday means of communication. That, as Erskine sees it, is part and parcel of the devilish genius of the theater.
more here.
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