Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
1/10/10
We've all got 'em:
historical people, places and events we'd love to time travel back to meet,
see, or be a part of. And for me, high on the list is the heyday
of Orson Welles and his Mercury Theater, stretching from their stage period,
through the War of the Worlds radio era and ending with Welles'
early films. Oh, yeah, Welles was an egomaniac and a taskmaster,
but he was also the kind of outsized genius who gives you a lifetime of
stories, and the Mercury players hit one home run after another until their
fearless leader finally burned too many bridges to continue. But
oh, to have been a part of all that! Author Robert Kaplow, screenwriter
Holly Gent Palmo and director Richard Linklater are with me, at least according
to their tale Me and Orson Welles, which casts Zac Efron as a 1937
high school kid lucky enough to ever-so-briefly get pulled into the orbit
of the Mercury players at the moment when a Broadway production of Julius
Caesar was about to begin their golden age. Quibble if you wish
with the adequate but unspectacular A-story involving Efron's Richard Samuels
and his quasi-romance with Claire Danes' Sonja Jones. But Welles
has Welles and plenty of him, with Christian McKay giving perhaps the best
performance ever as the iconic filmmaker and James Tupper matching him
every step of the way as the coolest Joseph Cotton ever. If you love
the theater, Caesar, Welles, or the Mercury company in general,
Me and Orson Welles has more than enough delights to carry you through
the slow patches.
Richard Samuels (Zac Efron)
is one of those kids bursting at the seams with enthusiasm for the arts:
plays, music, movies, you name it, he wants to be a part of it. And
one day, a big opportunity falls into his lap: Orson Welles (Christian
McKay) has just fired the kid who was going to play Lucius in his upcoming
Broadway production of Julius Caesar, and needs a replacement.
He takes a liking to Richard, putting on a show with some drums outside
his theater, and hires him on the spot. And so he's swept into the
maelstrom that is the Mercury Theater company: actors like playboy
Joseph Cotton (James Tupper) and perpetually anxious George Coulouris (Ben
Chaplin) try their best to learn and enact Welles' ever-changing vision
of a Caesar set in contemporary Fascist Italy, while behind-the-scenes
drama does its' best to compete with Shakespeare's. Every guy on
the set has made a play for Sonja Jones (Claire Danes), who's been helping
the production in a variety of capacities in exchange for a promise from
John Houseman (Eddie Marsan) to introduce her to David O. Selznick.
But it's Richard who catches her interest, and the two share a fling he
mistakes for love, a mistake that could prove costly when Welles himself
takes an interest in her. With all these distractions, how can Julius
Caesar hope to be anything but a disaster?
You don't think we'd be watching
a movie about it 70 years later if that had happened, do you? Since
it's hard to imagine why you'd be watching if you didn't at least know
who Welles was, Me and Orson Welles doesn't even bother to try generating
suspense about the outcome of the crazy creative process that brought Caesar
to the stage. Instead, it winks at our knowledge that everything
will work out and creates an infectious desire to do just what Richard
does; finding a way to share, even if only for a moment, in something truly
great.
The movie pivots on its Welles,
and Christian McKay, who earlier played him onstage, is just about perfect.
He's got it all down: the look, the voice, and most importantly the
larger-than-life charisma that allowed him to get away with bouts of extreme
egomania. The film makes the excellent point that the egomania and
the genius flowed from mostly the same place: we watch him hijack
a few moments of a radio play he's doing to insert a passage from The
Magnificent Ambersons that proves to be its highlight, and when we
finally see Caesar performed, we know he knew what he was talking about
the whole time even if it did nothing but exasperate everyone else.
While the role isn't as showy or prominent, Tupper is similarly sensational
as Joseph Cotton, nailing the man's look, speech and mannerisms while making
him seem like just about the coolest guy ever. Ben Chaplin is called
upon to paint a more complex, less flattering, but ultimately delightful
picture of George Coulouris, who spends the entire rehearsal process predicting
doom before battling extreme stage fright and then nailing his part.
Leo Bill is a delight as the young Norman Lloyd, whose role as Cinna the
Poet keeps getting cut and reinserted right up to the last minute.
Eddie Marsan doesn't have nearly the luck summoning John Houseman that
Cary Elwes did in The Cradle Will Rock, but all-around, it's a truly
splendid set of Mercury players.
They are, of course, not
the stars of Me and Orson Welles, but there is a certain benefit
to having those legendary real-life people not be cheapened by the movie's
central love story. Efron, not so much playing his first adult role
as appearing in his first adult movie, is fine as Richard, convincingly
conveying both the brash excitement and secret fear of being a kid swimming
in waters far deeper than he'd previously experienced, and Danes is appropriately
clever and charming as the object of his affections. But nothing
that happens between them really matters until Welles gets involved, at
which time Richard learns some hard lessons about the difference between
being a kid and an adult, primarily that as an adult sometimes you just
have to shut up and go with the flow. Zoe Kazan has a few cute scenes
as the girl Richard's got an actual shot with.
But the play's the thing
here, and Linklater stages Julius Caesar with consummate skill,
making the viewer feel like a member of both the cast and the audience.
Me and Orson Welles is among the best movies ever made about the
process of putting a play together, so even if you don't geek out upon
seeing the Mercury Players resurrected so convincingly, it's still a fine
movie about the hard work that goes into genius. I myself did geek
out upon seeing it, a nice bonus. |
