Me and Orson Welles (2008)

User Rating:

8.1/10   

Director:

Richard Linklater

Writers:

Holly Gent Palmo (adaptation)
Holly Gent Palmo (screenplay)

Genre:

Drama

Plot:

A teenager is cast in the Mercury Theatre production of "Julius Ceasar" directed by a young Orson Welles in 1937. |

Plot Keywords:

Based On Novel

Cast

Ben Chaplin	...	George Coulouris
Claire Danes	...	Sonja Jones
Zac Efron	...	Richard Samuels
Zoe Kazan	...	Gretta Alder
Eddie Marsan	...	John Houseman
Christian McKay	...	Orson Welles
Kelly Reilly	...	Muriel Brassler
James Tupper	...	Joseph Cotten
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Thomas Arnold	...	George Duthie
Leo Bill
Shane James Bordas	...	Elliott Reid
Michael Brandon	...	Les Tremayne
Janie Dee	...	Mrs. Samuels
Alessandro Giuggioli	...	Hiram Sherman
Garrick Hagon	...	Dr. Mewling
Patrick Kennedy	...	Grover Burgess
Lexie Lambert	...	Lizzy
Harry Macqueen	...	John A Willard
Megan Maczko	...	Evelyn Allen
Aidan McArdle
Michael J. McEvoy	...	Epstein
Jo McInnes	...	Jeannie Rosenthal
Iain McKee	...	Vakhtangov
Simon Nehan	...	Joe Holland
Travis Oliver	...	John Hoyt
Rhodri Neil Orders	...	Stefan Schnabel
Nathan Osgood	...	Radio Announcer
Simon Lee Phillips	...	Walter Ash
Imogen Poots
Saskia Reeves	...	Barbara Luddy
Marlene Sidaway	...	Grandmother Samuels
Daniel Tuite	...	William Mowry
Al Weaver	...	Sam Leve
Robert Wilfort	...	Radio Director

Runtime:

114 min | Canada:107 min (Toronto International Film Festival)

Country:

UK

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Filming Locations:

Crystal Palace Park, Penge, London, England, UK

Company:

CinemaNX

Great portrayal of Welles in a charming film

Considering the fanatic cult following that Richard Linklater has developed with films like Waking Life, Before Sunrise/Sunset, and A Scanner Darkly, let me preface this review by saying that I'm not a Linklater devotee. If Linklater is endowed with a species of genius, I must confess complete ignorance to it. Indeed, my favorite Linklater film was School of Rock, and he has always impressed me more by the breadth of his work and his willingness to challenge the conventions of film than by any individual film. It's perhaps this maverick spirit that drew him to do a film about Orson Welles.

Me and Orson Welles, based on a novel by Robert Kaplow, tells the story of a teenager, Richard Samuels (Zac Efron), who is swept from learning about Shakespeare in the classroom to the fast paced world of the Mercury Theater on Broadway when he lands a role in Orson Welles famous 1937 production of Caesar. As Orson Welles struggles to get the production ready for the premier, Richard falls for the theater's resident hottie, a charming and ambitious aspiring actress played by Claire Daines, and finds himself growing up quickly to the realities of show business and the real world.

The movie is entirely carried by it's acting, and the actor generating the most buzz is the British born Christian McKay who plays Welles. I'm very uneasy about praising portrayals of real life figures, because it seems any time an actor plays any historical figure (from Gandhi to Capote and Idi Amin) they receive excessive attention. I think it has less to do with the "acting" involved than it has to do with the fact that most audiences feel much more comfortable passing judgment (and bestowing praise) on mimicry than actual acting. That said, McKay does a masterful job in capturing that mythical image of a young Orson Welles that all of us film geeks have in our head, from the striking resemblance in appearance to the pitch perfect intonations in his voice. Welles is charming and maddening, endearing and brutal, and always larger than life... and McKay captures it all perfectly. It's clearly a role that McKay has been mastering for a long time, as he was doing a one-man-show about Welles on Broadway before being snatched for the role in Me and Orson Welles. From the Q&A session (at the Toronto international film festival), McKay seemed intelligent and passionate about his work, and I truly hope he doesn't get pigeon-holed into spoofing Welles for his entire career.

Unfortunately the other acting foot that the movie stands on, isn't nearly as good. Zac Efron is just so pretty (and I say this as a heterosexual male) that it becomes distracting. Watching Efron act, it feels like he's trying to make women orgasm in every scene he's in, which works well in enough in the many scenes he's trying to court Claire Daines's character, but doesn't work in any other scene. Efron's acting makes it hard for the audience to emotionally connect and prevents the movie from achieving the emotional punch it might otherwise. The audience is never drawn in and they remain spectators, which, fortunately, isn't such a bad thing since the movie is so fun and nostalgically charming. Perhaps even the flighty and ethereal feeling the film gets because of it's lack of punch can be forgiven, since it's a movie about youth and growing up and so much of that involves tempestuous passions that end up being quite meaningless in retrospect.

8/10