Citizen Welles

So, the story of the making of a theatrical production—any theatrical production—is, wonder of wonders, one of the most cinematic of events. What makes the form so compelling? People behaving badly, people behaving nobly, money on the line, fame and fortune in the offing, and a time limit—the pulse-pounding climax when the show must open whether the characters are ready or not. The interesting part about these backstage dramas is that, no matter how melodramatic they get, they only approximate the true level of tension, rivalry, hostility, and excitement of a theater work in the throes of birth. The Broadway wag Larry Gelbart once famously said that “if Hitler’s alive, I hope he’s out of town with a musical.” But that can be said of nearly any show, including a grammar school production.

The backstage drama is such a vivid form that its vitality happily infects even the wan direction, indifferent writing, and problematic conception of a modest and pretty new film called Me and Orson Welles. Richard Linklater’s movie, based on a novel for young adults that I can’t imagine any young adult of the current generation has ever actually read, is about a 17-year-old suburban boy crazy for the arts who skips school one day in 1937 and comes into New York City. In an hour’s time young Richard finds himself hired to play the lute and perform in a production of Julius Caesar—simply called Caesar—that is due to open in a week. The venue is a new theater called the Mercury. The director and star is Orson Welles. And everything goes wrong until, finally, everything goes wonderfully right.

The Welles Caesar was, in fact, a groundbreaking production, one of the first Shakespeare plays to be done in modern dress and perhaps the first to envision the parallels between Shakespeare’s fear of the mob and the rise of fascism. Me and Orson Welles marks the second time in a decade someone has seen fit to make a film about the pre-Citizen Kane director and his newsmaking, disaster-courting production of a Broadway show. The first was Tim Robbins’s awful Cradle Will Rock (1999), in which Welles is portrayed, bizarrely and stupidly, as a fey twit.

Me and Orson Welles features a much more credible, much more haunting Welles in the person of a British actor named Christian McKay, who not only looks like Welles, but captures a gloriously mad gleam in his eyes and the overwhelming personal magnetism that captivated and dominated people for decades.

The problem with McKay’s performance, and with the movie as a whole, is that it fails to capture the truly astounding fact about Welles in 1937, which is this: He was all of 22 years old, only a few years older than the high school “me” of the movie’s title. He was a very great genius, perhaps the most prodigious artistic talent America ever produced. He did things on stage, on radio, and with a movie camera no one had ever done before, and all before he was 25. And then he mostly ran dry.

McKay, 35 when the movie was made, already looks somewhat dissipated. When he refers to our boy protagonist as “Junior,” he really does seem to be a much older man tutoring a protégé. And when he is angered by Junior’s rivalry for the attentions of a cute stagehand, he seems like a vaguely creepy seducer a decade older than she when any such relationship would actually have occurred between Welles and a woman who was his senior.

That would have been a much more interesting movie, a movie about a kid in love with the arts and his relationship with the slightly older kid who has been touched by the Muses but is still a kid. As it is, Me and Orson Welles is just a conventional tale of a theatrical megalomaniac and a wide-eyed innocent.

Even so, it’s captivating. Because it’s a backstage drama, and when the curtain rises, your heart pounds. Just as though you’re backstage.

John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic.