Wheels of Justice

The Critic is a new film set in 1930s London about a poison-penned aging theater critic played by Ian McKellen. Although presumably unintended, it could be a Christian devotional film about the wages of sin while far exceeding the typical stagecraft of a “Christian” film.

Lushly portrayed in the theaters, streets, private clubs, board rooms and country estates of pre-WWII Britain, The Critic is visually rich. It is also spiritually rich as it intricately demonstrates how chicanery, lust, and ambition among several people cascade and reinforce each other with calamitous results.

The theater critic has notoriously ensconced himself in London society through his entertainingly vicious show-ending reviews of British theater. He relishes his obsessive takedowns of one particular mediocre actress. Her career has ceilinged thanks to his critiques. Counseled by her mother, she confronts him, and he explains she has failed as an actress by failing to find her own inner fire.

This theater critic was a favorite of the newspaper’s previous owner, who has just died.  The son and new owner, who has also inherited his father’s title as viscount and estate, is less of a fan and instructs the critic to reduce his fire. He also disapproves the critic’s barely hidden promiscuous homosexuality, which includes patronizing male prostitutes in London parks.

When the theater critic is arrested in the park, the newspaper rescues him, but he is fired. The critic plots recovery and revenge against the newspaper owner, who is universally regarded as above reproach. Nobody is a saint, the critic cynically insists, searching for weakness. He finds as his weapon the mediocre actress, with whom the newspaper baron has an unspoken fixation from afar. Knowing the newspaper baron is trapped with his mentally ill wife and lonely, the critic recruits the actress to seduce him. Her reward will be glowing reviews that propel her to new levels on the London stage.

That actress has just ended her affair with the newspaper owner’s son-in-law, who is a painter currently producing a grand portrait of all the newspaper’s leading stars, including the theater critic. Only momentarily pausing for reasons of conscience, she agrees to seduce the aristocratic press baron, assured by the critic that it’s just one more theatrical role. She completes her task, and the critic blackmails his victim, who grants him a generous new employment contract.

But the son-in-law wins the actress back and tells his wife that the marriage is over. His father-in-law, with gentlemanly aplomb in their private London club, gently asks him to reconsider the divorce. He then learns that his son-in-law is in love with the actress with whom he had recently trysted. Overcome by remorse and disgust, the newspaper baron writes polite goodbye letters to everyone from the exquisite desk of his country estate, and then shoots himself on the beautiful estate grounds by the light of dawn. His death is reported as a hunting accident.

While the theater critic has no remorse and attends his employer’s funeral, the actress is grieved and appears at the critic’s house drunk and despondent. He sends her to his bathtub to detox, where she rants about reporting their antics to the police. The critic then drowns her in the tub. His young male secretary, who is also his paramour, appears and urges calling the police. But the wily critic persuades him instead to help remove the body to the seashore, where she’ll appear to have drowned from intoxication.

The actress’s mother and married lover are grief-stricken. And the critic’s secretary is eventually moved by conscience to go to the press baron’s daughter, who now presides over the estate and media empire. Does he want money, she asks. No, he responds, he only seeks what is right, even though he might himself face jailtime for disposing of the body. The theater critic is jailed amid newspaper headlines. He writes his young paramour that he was surprised by his courage to act but is not shocked by his betrayal. That paramour then becomes the newspaper’s new theater critic.

Had the theater critic, who is initially sympathetic and charming, escaped judgement for his crimes, the film would have been a nihilistic disaster. But there is justice for everyone’s sins. Only the secretary finds mercy by confessing his sins and submitting to potential punishment. At one point, the theater critic, asked by one of his collaborators about possible divine judgement for their misdeeds, declares himself an atheist for whom there is only the now, with no concerns of an afterlife.

But judgment falls upon the critic and his collaborators in this life. The actress and newspaper owner are dead. The son-in-law has lost his lover and his marriage, while his wife has become the new media baron. The repentant secretary has replaced his older paramour as theater critic. The magisterial painting of the newspaper’s patriarchs is completed and displayed in the board room, with the critic notably absent. His crimes, which sought to enshrine his role in the newspaper and in society, were for nought. From prison, the critic implores his former secretary and paramour to visit. He will not be around much longer, he notes.

The political subplot in the film is the rise of the British Union of Fascists, whose thugs are in London streets. The interrogating police officer when the theater critic is first arrested for his sexual escapades is wearing a Fascist lapel pin. The newspaper owner recalls that his late father had liked Fascist leader Oswald Mosley. In real life, press baron Lord Rothermere did support the British Fascists and left Britain at the start of WWII to escape disgrace, dying mysteriously in Bermuda. The British Fascists in the film almost represent a temptation for and a form of potential divine judgment on the nation, a judgement from which the nation just barely escaped.

No, The Critic is not a Christian film, but its themes of sin, judgment and potential redemption are more powerfully performed than in most Christian films.