Updated September 20, 2024 at 15:45 PM ET
In the new movie The Critic, Ian McKellen plays a 1930s theater reviewer who is, let’s say, not always kind. He shreds actors' reputations, delights in being impossible to please, and is willing to bring down the newspaper he writes for if his authority is so much as challenged.
All of which set me – a longtime film and theater scribe – to musing about karma. Critics are paid to dish out criticism. But occasionally (and this is one such occasion) artists strike back in works that depict critics in a less than flattering light. Can we take it?
Critics on screen
Near the start of the 1973 horror movie Theater of Blood, the head of a Critics’ Guild is lured to a vacant house and attacked by a mob. Bleeding from multiple stab wounds, he staggers to the policeman who brought him, and watches in horror as the cop peels off makeup and a wig and starts spouting lines from Julius Caesar.
It’s Vincent Price as a Shakespearean actor the Critics’ Guild had humiliated two years earlier. Payback most foul — and on the Ides of March, too.
Most of the Critics Guild will be dead by the final reel, dispatched in the manner of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, because this actor is an artist, and as critics, his victims are but walking shadows.
You could say the same about critics in most movies. Leeches, know-nothings, frauds, and still more respectable than TV’s comedy-show critics, who mostly do riffs on thumb-meisters Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert: In Living Color’s wildly effeminate “Men on Film,” for example (“haaated it!"); Wayne and Garth with their we’re-not-worthy, metal-head variation on Saturday Night Live; The Muppet Show’s Statler and Waldorf. There was also the Jon Lovitz animated sitcom The Critic, about a film reviewer humiliated by the things his station makes him do. (That one inspired a meta moment when the show was reviewed for real by Siskel & Ebert, who quipped that they'd be happy to write a few scripts.)
In on the joke — that’s television. When movies take on critics, it’s not really a joke. Take the 1950 classic All About Eve. The first voice we hear is an upper-crusty intellectual sounding very full of himself – Addison DeWitt, played by George Sanders, claiming that as a critic, he is “essential to the theater.” He is, whatever you make of his taste, a jerk — and he’s typical of how critics are generally depicted.
Which makes, I have to admit, a certain kind of sense, even from my vantage point as a reviewer. You have to love an art form to devote all your time to writing about it, but tell that to the artist who’s spent years on a project and then had reviewers critique it overnight. It no doubt feels as if there are preconceptions, and maybe even malice involved.
That’s how it was depicted in the Oscar-winning Best Picture Birdman. Michael Keaton plays a washed up movie actor and sometime superhero about to make his stage debut, when he encounters an influential theater critic in a bar. She tells him, unprompted, “I’m going to destroy your play.”
“But you haven’t seen it,” he quite reasonably responds, only to have her tell him that she views him, and all film actors, as unworthy of the stage — “untrained, and unprepared even to attempt real art.”
The contempt is mutual. He grabs her notes and sees nothing but labels. There's nothing in her writing about structure, about intentions. But more to the point, he says, “None of this costs you anything. You risk nothing. I’m an actor. This play cost me everything.”
The evolution of the critic
There was a time in the 1960s and ‘70s when critics were both esteemed and influential. Contrarian Pauline Kael, auteur-minded Andrew Sarris, filmmakers François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, and theater critics Walter Kerr and Robert Brustein all were inspirations to me when I was starting out.
But it’s been decades since anyone had similar sway, and with aggregator sites like Rotten Tomatoes reducing everything to a number, most moviegoers now turn to critics less for analysis than for consumer advice.
There has been one bright spot for my profession on screen. Ratatouille in 2007. At that time, no Pixar film had even had mixed reviews, let alone bad ones. So perhaps the writers of this tale of a rat who was a chef were feeling generous.
They created a food critic in the classic mode – snooty, full of himself, and voiced with a plummy accent by Peter O'Toole – they even named him Anton Ego. But when he finally tasted the title dish, he melted, describing it and the critical profession with an eloquence that brought this critic close to tears.
“In many ways,” Ego intones, “the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read."
Now, let me offer a cavil to this. Negative criticism is indeed fun to read, but generally isn't fun to write, at least for me. You know how, when you see a good movie, you can't wait to call friends and tell them to see it — whereas when you see a bad movie, you just want to move on and forget it? It's not really all that different when you're a reviewer. Still, give the writers their viewpoint. The rest is golden.
"The bitter truth we critics must face," Ego continues, "is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so."
“There are times when a critic truly risks something," Ego continues, "and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends.
"Last night, I experienced something new: an extraordinary meal from a singularly unexpected source. To say that both the meal and its maker have challenged my preconceptions about fine cooking is a gross understatement. They have rocked me to my core."
Oh, that writing! Oh, that sentiment! On the aggregator site Metacritic, which compiles reviews from magazines and newspapers, Ratatouille's critiques are among the best for any Pixar movie. Tied for first place, in fact.
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