 |
| Director Richard Linklater |
 |
| Linklater on the set with Zac Efron and Richard McKay |
 |
| Author Robert Kaplow |
 |
| Arthur Anderson and Orson Welles in Julius Caesar, 1937 |
ME AND ORSON WELLES B+ USA Great Britain (114 mi) 2008 ‘Scope d: Richard Linklater
“How the hell do I top this?” —Orson Welles (Christian McKay)
Richard Linklater movies tend to have a modernist bent to them, where you can feel at times as if you’re lost in a minefield of existential drift. But that is certainly not the case here in what amounts to a charming and thoroughly enjoyable piece of historical nostalgia, set in 1937 when Orson Welles was attempting to open his Mercury Theater production with a performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, a heavily cut, empty-staged yet daring, politically-charged stage adaptation set in Mussolini’s fascist Italy, with Welles playing the part of Brutus. Linklater is a sincere admirer of Welles, calling him the patron saint of independent filmmakers. With wall-to-wall jazz music and a typewriter style opening title sequence, one would swear we are about to witness a Woody Allen movie, but we are soon introduced to a strange new world, all led by the larger-than-life persona of the young 22-year old Welles who has yet to make a single movie and is full of swagger and theatrical bluster. The brilliant performance by British actor Christian McKay, an alumnus of the Royal Shakespeare Company who was discovered when he played Welles in a one-man play, Rosebud: The Lives of Orson Welles, on a small stage in London, just nails the all-too-perfect speech intonations and sardonic facial expressions of Welles, a young genius child prodigy who has yet to take the world by storm. Alongside Richard Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote in Bennett Miller’s CAPOTE (2005), this is one of the great biographical film performances, though completely ignored by the Academy, where Welles’ blustery self-assurance and bullying sarcastic wit are on full display, obviously a man on a mission who is just getting his first taste of his own powers, literally browbeating his cast into submission, refusing to accept anyone else’s way except his own, quickly showing them the door if they refuse, so everyone defers to his judgment. After all, he takes credit for every idea, even Shakespeare’s, calling it an Orson Welles production of Shakespeare, where he gets top billing, deleting characters and scenes on a whim whenever the mood suits him, but also making everyone feel that despite the fact they are receiving no salary, they are just a few days away from being a part of theater history.
Interesting that this is the very first Shakespeare performance on Broadway, ever, where Welles is like a traveling road show that rolls in and out of town, driven by the breeze of destiny, yet the “Me” of the title concerns a small bit player, a coming-of-age 17-year old New Jersey high school student Richard (teen idol Zac Efron, working outside his comfort zone), who dreams of becoming an actor, skipping school, wandering downtown, and happening by chance to see Welles on the street in front of the theater, playing up to his enormous ego, all lies and pretense, but he wins a role as the charming, lute-strumming (it’s actually a ukulele) Lucius in the modern-dress revival of the play which is opening in a week. Adapted by a husband and wife team of Holly Gent Palmo and Vincent Palmo Jr. based upon a New York Times best-selling, meticulously researched historical novel by Robert Kaplow, a writer and New Jersey high school English teacher who was inspired by an archival photograph of a young 15-year old actor (Arthur Anderson) strumming the lute next to Welles onstage, imagining just what he must have been thinking at the time. Linklater cleverly mixes fact and fiction in this portrait of the artist as a young man, as the film is limited to this memorable week of rehearsals, providing a window into the world of theater, showing the passionate camaraderie of those weary participants, very attentive to period detail, revealing behind-the-scenes vignettes of the principal players, but especially Welles who dominates every scene, as even when the cast sits around doing nothing, “We’re waiting for Orson,” his aura remains evident at all times. To learn his part, Richard is referred to Sonja (Claire Danes), the all-purpose, exceedingly ambitious personal assistant who is likely already sleeping with Welles (along with pretty much every other female), who has promised her a chance to meet David O. Selznick and an opportunity to play in GONE WITH THE WIND (1939). Discovering her last name is Jones, Richard serenades her with a line from Rodgers and Hart, Have You Met Miss Jones?, which might actually have spawned the director’s later interest in making Blue Moon (2025). Thoroughly flirtatious, leading to grownup sex, the two become fast friends, which they remain throughout the film, though she trusts Richard simply because he has no clout, so she can be open and honest with him, guiding him through the egos and everyday disasters that take place each day on the set.
Recalling the immersive nature of Cameron Crowe’s ALMOST FAMOUS (2000), with an observant young teenage reporter surrounded by a brave new world of rock ‘n’ roll, Efron is not very good in the play, but that hardly matters, as he’s playing a young novice who’s not supposed to be very good, so he fits comfortably into the production, enthralled by the world around him, which features excellent performances all around. In perhaps the film’s best scene, Welles whisks “the kid” into a cab with him on route to the radio studio where he observes Welles perform a skit on a live radio broadcast, but along the way Welles drops his guard and reads him a passage from Booth Tarkington’s novel The Magnificent Ambersons, where he mourns that “Ambersons is about how everything gets taken away from you,” a stunning personal admission considering the Hollywood brass did exactly that to his career just a few short years later, destroying his original ending on The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and effectively ending his Hollywood career. When Welles ad-libs an Ambersons passage on the radio, adding a delicious soliloquy for himself, he’s profoundly seeing his career years ahead of himself. Outside of Welles, James Tupper is absolutely brilliant as the suave and ever cordial James Cotton, the man behind the scenes of so many of Welles’ successes, Ben Chaplin plays an anxiety-ridden leading man George Coulouris, quickly whisking his mistress offstage when his wife arrives, Eddie Marsan plays the constantly perplexed theater manager and old friend, John Houseman, while Zoe Kazan (Elia Kazan’s granddaughter) plays Gretta, an aspiring young writer Richard befriends, helping her get published in The New Yorker. While Richard is quickly informed by Sonja of his status, “You’re not getting anything except the opportunity to be sprayed by Orson’s spit,” Orson has a habit of initially bolstering each actor’s confidence with flowery praise, such as seeing “images of magnificence” in their eyes before bringing them back down to earth with his rapid fire rounds of terse criticism. Thankfully, Linklater does show various scenes from the theatrical premiere, all of which feel like a special treat, so the audience is rewarded and never for a moment feels cheated in this film.
While the film was a box office bomb, premiering in Toronto after select footage was screened at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, and not released in the U.S. until a year later, this is something completely different for Linklater, yet it’s essential filmmaking, upbeat and thoroughly enjoyable, like a light at the end of the tunnel following the dark times of the Depression, beautifully extolling the glories and virtues of still being young, filled with idealistic hope and promise, with the film suggesting, “it’s all ahead of us.” Offering an ambitious, behind-the-scenes glimpse of a theater production in the making, this spirited film always feels balanced, intelligent and amusing, filled with an unbridled wit and humor, along with a select few poor souls who unfortunately feel the ignominious wrath of an undeterred mad hatter in charge, yet the focus doesn’t always swirl around Orson Welles, the man who commands the salacious interest in every scene, where it’s hard to take your eyes off such a brilliant rendering of his overwhelming personality. Instead, the week’s events are seen and filtered through the somewhat bland eyes (think Tab Hunter) of the young thespian who’s still taking classes in high school (actually found sleeping in class, due to his late night carousing), an idealistic, wide-eyed everyman character, just a few years younger than Welles himself, who instantly falls in love with Sonja, and whose life is forever altered by this experience. Beautifully shot in London, New York, and the Isle of Man by Mike Leigh’s superb cinematographer Dick Pope, the film benefits from some plot twists, capturing the essence of Welles as a rising star and the beginning of the Welles legend, exhaustively researched, with a very beautiful reconstruction of the post-depression era of the 1930’s, a period where art and culture merged together. Perhaps not up to the caliber of Cassavetes’ brilliant Opening Night (1977), or Chaplin’s LIMELIGHT (1952), both the ultimate masterworks in revealing the wrenching behind-the-scenes activities of a stage production, or even Desplechin’s delightfully offbeat ESTHER KAHN (2000), this film is nonetheless fueled by the supercharged performance of a young, unheralded actor who perfectly captures the indomitable spirit of Orson Welles, a legendary, larger-than-life figure who is one of America’s greatest and most controversial artists.
