Me & Orson Welles
Dir: Richard Linklater
Rating: 3.5/5.0
Freestyle Releasing
107 Minutes
Orson Welles was a dick. At least, according to Richard Linklater. You can assume that, as a filmmaker of artistic note, Linklater is a fan of Welles (his favorite? Probably F for Fake), but he doesn’t even attempt to romanticize or redeem the legendary actor/director/voiceover artist in Me & Orson Welles. Instead, the man is portrayed a charismatic, well-spoken genius/egomaniac who acts a dick to everyone but gets a pass because he’s so brilliant. Which is fine, because he is.
Thank god nobody’s yet made a biopic of Welles; it would almost certainly play like a greatest hits record. Here’s him trying to pitch Citizen Kane but the suits don’t “get” it! Here’s a montage of marquees bearing the names of his movies! Here’s his drunken nervous breakdown during a fish sticks commercial! Here’s a majority of the budget spent exclusively on prop whiskey and steaks!
Rather, Me & Orson Welles uses the young-adult-friendly novel by Robert Kaplow as an excuse to deliver a fictionalized account of Welles’ pivotal modern-dress staging of Julius Caesar. The protagonist Richard (Zach Efron), a bored yet ambitious 17-year-old, serves as the eyes through which we see Welles (a spot-on portrayal by Christian McKay that sometimes borders on impression) and the Mercury Theatre, while also weaseling his way into a gig playing Lucius in Welles’ modern-day dress staging of Julius Caesar.
Linklater and his screenwriters wisely don’t give us a whole lot of Richard’s personal life because we’d just get bored and ask for more behind-the-scenes antics, please. Linklater, clearly more interested in Orson Welles than in the main character, gives us just enough of Richard to give the movie some sort of identification to excuse his study of Welles. We open on a brief scene of Richard bored in class and suddenly he’s on his way to New York City. Later we get a brief scene of his mother berating him for skipping school to remind us that he’s still a kid. The most we get out of him is his relationship with the production assistant Sonja Jones (Claire Danes), because romance is an easy way to get people interested. Sometimes Richard doesn’t even figure into a scene, and thankfully the film doesn’t try to force him into the fray.
Perhaps the most striking sequence is the climactic opening night performance. This is where Linklater and cinematographer Dick Pope get to play with some astonishing noir-style lighting and composition using mostly using wide static shots of the stage. The murder of the poet Cinna is the sequence’s great shot: red background, shadowy figures gradually surrounding the frazzled poet, and then he vanishes in the crowd as if consumed by them, perfectly selling the effect to us as it does the audience.
Each act is punctuated by a run-in between Richard and a young aspiring writer, revealing that the idea of young people going to New York City to make it big is not a new one. These feel like modern scenes cleverly inserted into a period piece: a guy meets a girl in a record store and they talk about music. She’s a writer who working on a self-indulgent story about herself, commenting that their meeting would make for a great scene. These are the most characteristically Linklater scenes–young people intelligently talking about minutia.
Me & Orson Welles is secretly one big meta-piece. Linklater’s made a historical piece about the staging of one of Shakespeare’s historical pieces. Linklater’s camera, script, and actors are the 17 daggers. Welles is Caesar. Efron is Richard, the relative newbie out of his element. Or is Richard Linklater the character Richard (the “Me” of the piece), feeling diminished in an art form he shares with the master, attempting to understand him?
by Danny Djeljosevic
