Me and Orson Welles
Review By: Gordon K. Smith
Orson Welles was a true genius of the 20th Century who hit his zenith too soon. At the incredible age of 26 he directed, cowrote and starred in the greatest American film of all time, 1941’s Citizen Kane. Had he never done anything else, the genius label would still apply for that achievement. Yet Welles was also a brilliant actor, announcer, stage director and producer, magician...and like many brilliant people, he could be demanding, difficult, manipulative, and arrogant. He never scaled the heights of Kane again in his career, and died in 1985 with numerous unfinished projects, as much his fault as anyone else’s. By most accounts his personal skills didn’t always match his astonishing creative ones.
Welles the filmmaker has been the subject of, or a character in, numerous features and TV movies, from Ed Wood to Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures. Less attention has been paid to Welles’ pre-Kane days with The Mercury Theatre in New York. That chapter finally gets its due with director Richard Linklater’s most enjoyable new drama, Me and Orson Welles, scripted by Holly Gent Palmo, Vincent Palmo and Robert Kaplow, from the latter’s novel. A deft mixture of fiction and fact, it takes place in 1937 with the company’s groundbreaking opening production of “Julius Caesar”, revisioned in the dress of the Fascist regimes then in the headlines (it was the huge success of this production that allowed The Mercury Players to stage their infamous “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast the next year). The eponymous Me is teenaged Broadway hopeful Richard Samuels (Disney cash cow Zac Effron) who lucks into an impromptu audition with Welles, and gets the plum featured role of Lucius in the production. In the grand tradition of “backstage” movies, Richard learns some hard life lessons about love, art, and megalomania his first time up to show-biz bat.
For a film with Welles as a pivotal character to work at all, something more than a superficial imitation is needed, and this film gets it, in the form of British character actor Christian McKay, who’s performed a one-man show about Welles and just nails it spot-on. Far more than other actors who have attempted the role, McKay achieves the charisma, the IQ, the vanity, and especially the inflection of one of the most famous voices ever recorded. It’s doesn’t hurt that he even resembles Welles to a sometimes startling degree (enough to make you forget that the real Orson would have been 22 years old at the time - McKay is 36). Unlike Angus MacFayden in the similar Cradle Will Rock or Liev Schreiber in RKO 281, you simply accept McKay as Welles instead of trying in vain to match the actor and the role.
And there’s more fun to be had for any film or theatre geek in the portrayals of Mercury regulars Joseph Cotton, John Houseman, and George Coulouris (an especially effective Ben Chaplin) and the convincing recreation of late-Depression New York City (amazingly, mostly done at England’s famed Pinewood Studios). A leaner-looking Claire Danes has her best role in years as Sonja, the office girl with aspirations of her own, who’s not above some compromises.
There’s already some backlash against the casting of pretty-boy Effron; while there doesn’t appear to have been any conscious attempt made to de-glamorize his makeup or hair style, it certainly makes sense from an art-house marketing viewpoint, and he makes good use of his singing and dancing chops. His scenes with Danes and fellow struggling artist Zoe Kazan are well-judged by Linklater, working in what would seem to be new territory for the Austin director. His recreation of a 1937 Welles live radio show from the period is another of the little pleasures of Me and Orson Welles, a modest gem likely to get submerged by the more-ballyhooed holiday releases, and hopefully remembered when the awards get handed out.
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