Me and Orson Welles
Richard Linklater (2008)
A fictional perspective on a real piece of theatrical history: Richard Samuels, a stagestruck New Jersey teenager, gets involved, in the small part of Lucius, in Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre production of Julius Caesar on Broadway in 1937. Holly Gent Palmo and Vincent Palmo Jr adapted the screenplay from a novel by Robert Kaplow, first published in 2003. An online article about the picture[1] describes the source of Kaplow’s inspiration:
‘… Arthur Anderson appeared in the Mercury Theatre Julius Caesar as Lucius, memorably photographed by Cecil Beaton as a 15-year-old, singing ‘Orpheus with his lute’ for Brutus (Welles) … The largely fictionalized template for Richard Samuels …, Anderson remained with Orson as a member of the Mercury Theatre On The Air and became one of the leading voice artists on radio, as well as making regular appearances on stage, in films and on television.’
(I assume Richard Samuels is the character’s name in the novel. If so, it’s a rather nice coincidence that he not only shares his forename with the film’s director but nearly shares his surname with Marc Samuelson, who produced with Linklater and Anne Cardi.)
Richard is cocky and, when he first encounters the Mercury players in the street in New York and finds himself virtually auditioning on the spot, fearless. The implication is that Orson Welles recognises a kindred spirit. As well as playing Brutus, Welles, of course, directs the play, which he’s transposed from ancient Rome to a modern fascist state. According to the film (and our assumptions about him), Welles is a genius tyrant, a bastard, an egomaniac in everything from his peremptory direction of the proceedings on stage to his sexual predations off it. He very occasionally has to compromise (or appears to have to compromise); he mostly brooks no opposition. Every time he gets his own way the moment is double-edged, thanks to knowing what happened in the years ahead: it’s poignant to think how soon Welles stopped calling the shots in Hollywood and Richard Linklater’s insertion of an extract from The Magnificent Ambersons gets this across especially effectively in Me and Orson Welles. On the way to a recording of a radio play, Welles tells Richard how he loves the novel, that his family knew Booth Tarkington, that the character of Eugene Morgan is based on Welles’s father. When he opens the book and reads from it we see the text has been underlined and that he knows it by heart. At the radio play recording, Welles inserts the extract – it fits neatly between the two lines he’s actually supposed to say – in order to upstage another actor. I don’t know if this really happened but playing fast and loose with The Magnificent Ambersons can’t fail to bring to mind what RKO did with Welles’s screen adaptation.
The only point at which an implied reference to Welles’s later career is less effective is also the only point at which the film-makers seem to be pushing us to think about this. It occurs at the very end of the picture. Richard falls for a Mercury production assistant, Sonja Jones, and makes the mistake of standing up to Welles when the latter exercises sexual droit de seigneur in respect of Sonja: once the play’s triumphant opening night is out of the way, Welles fires him. Richard sits in his room reflectively cutting out newspaper rave reviews then goes out to meet Gretta Adler, an aspiring prose writer whom he first ran into just before Welles hired him and whom Richard’s tried to help get published. Gretta has great news: The New Yorker have now accepted her short story and, as they leave the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she and Richard talk about how great it is to think that everything’s just beginning and before them. Even though the script plays amusingly here with the word ‘possibilities’ (the word that Gretta’s high school teacher always used to disparage her creative writing), the youngsters’ optimism comes over as falsely self-aware. It seems to be meant to apply ironically to someone else in the story.
Zac Efron was in Hairspray on Broadway and is best known to cinema audiences from the High School Musical series. As Richard, he seems like a boy from the twenty-first century: his look and expressions don’t fit either with the members of the Mercury company or with his classmates back at high school – in the scenes where they’re shown on the receiving end of dry-as-dust teaching of Shakespearean texts. Yet his modern, emotionally vague presence enables Efron to work well not only as a rather passive receptor of the events in the story but as our proxy, as a bridge between now and the past in which the film is set. I’m not sure how consciously Richard Linklater intended this in casting Efron but if it’s an accident it’s a happy accident. It’s coherent with the slight artificiality of the period settings: lit by Dick Pope (Mike Leigh’s cinematographer), the street scenes have predominantly pinky, reddish-brown tones (‘raw Sienna’, according to Sally) – there’s a suggestion of photographs that have lost some of their colouring over time so that they seem half-way to sepia. This stylisation has the effect, reinforced by Jools Holland’s orchestrations of classic songs of the decade, of making 1937 New York appealing but inaccessible, stirring up feelings that bring us tantalisingly closer, but still at a remove from it.
Why doesn’t Claire Danes get more and better film roles? The trajectory of her screen career, compared with that of Leonardo DiCaprio, since Romeo + Juliet (1996) is dismaying evidence that there’s no justice. She was the best thing in the Luhrmann film, she was excellent in the small part of Meryl Streep’s daughter in The Hours and, as Sonja, she’s stunning here. Danes is very distinctively attractive; she seems the apotheosis of a particular, characteristic 1930s look yet she makes Sonja luminously individual too – cunningly poised between subservience and ambition. (Welles’ wish is Sonja’s command but she’s determined to get an interview with David O Selznick.) Apart from Sonja, there’s not too much available in the way of good parts for women in Me and Orson Welles (I suppose the fault of Shakespeare as much as anyone). Even so, Zoe Kazan is charmingly eccentric as Gretta and Kelly Reilly is funny as Muriel Brassler, the ‘prize bitch’ who’s playing Brutus’s wife Portia and who’s Welles’s current mistress.
Claire Danes, even if she deserves to be a bigger star, is a well-known name and face – unlike Christian McKay, whose breakthrough here as Orson Welles is extraordinary. According to the Wikipedia article on the film, McKay had played Welles before, on stage ‘in a small New York theatre’; according to his IMDB profile, however, he didn’t make his first cinema film until 2008 – for an actor in his mid-thirties, he hasn’t done that much work on television either. Welles was only 22 in 1937; McKay is evidently older but he’s been photographed cleverly, not just to point up his physical resemblance to Welles but also to emphasise the baby-faced look they share, and so minimise the age difference between them. The Palmos’ script and Linklater’s direction of the cast generally are strong on the confusion of artistic passion, pretence and self-delusion in the thespian psyche – but McKay makes the most of his especial opportunities for lightning transitions between sharp analysis of the theatre and Shakespeare and shooting a line. That moment on the way to the radio studio is a fine example of how hard it is to tell when Welles is being sincere and when he’s bull-shitting, and whether he himself knows the difference. When he says that making art is the most important thing in life, or describes acting as a precious respite from your own identity, or talks about his childhood, it rings true and false, and the dissonance is one of the film’s strengths. One of Welles’ favourite ingratiating tactics is to describe a member of the cast as a ‘God-created actor’. Richard is a recipient of this flattery at one point, makes use of it himself at another, and overhears Welles trotting it out in the dressing room when George Coulouris, playing Mark Antony, has an opening night panic attack (and thinks it’s a coronary) and his director has to talk him round to going on stage. What’s so good about this sequence is that McKay and Ben Chaplin as Coulouris succeed both in making the moment dramatic and in suggesting that the two characters have played the scene before.
Because Christian McKay has the look of Orson Welles, you’re primed to expect mimicry in a way you wouldn’t if there were no physical similarity; the same applies to James Tupper, who, as Joseph Cotten, has the original’s colouring and the same twinkle in his eye. These portraits are very enjoyable as impersonations but the actors are admirably relaxed: they’re never concentrating so hard on getting the details right that they lose connection with other performers. Not surprisingly, Linklater seems to have taken the view that it’s not so important to cast lookalikes as the members of the Mercury company whose faces are less well known to an audience nowadays – such as George Coulouris (for all that he’s memorable in Citizen Kane) and the producer John Houseman (who enjoyed an Indian summer as a screen actor in the 1970s). Ben Chaplin is very witty as Coulouris but the film didn’t do anything to change my mind about Eddie Marsan, who plays Houseman. Marsan’s unusual face is very strong but I think he’s an unnuanced actor: he seems to latch onto a single aspect of character, which he then plays for all it’s worth and to monotonous effect. Marsan is better later on in the film (and better than he was in Happy-Go-Lucky), when John Houseman has gone beyond shouting anxiety into a dazed, smiling certainty that Welles, against every rational expectation, will deliver. Leo Bill as Norman Lloyd, who plays Cinna the poet, also tends to be narrowly over-insistent. (The real Norman Lloyd celebrated his ninety-fifth birthday last month.)
The film has a few other weaknesses. Richard’s still being at school while he’s rehearsing with the Mercury company doesn’t come across as sharply as it might; and his home life is presented so cursorily that I wondered for a while if he’d left home to try and make his fortune in New York (and if the short schoolroom scenes were flashbacks). More seriously, the eventual production of Julius Caesar isn’t the climax you sense it’s meant to be. Because Linklater has, naturally enough, concentrated on the comically fraught aspects of rehearsals and Welles’s outrageous volatility and extemporising, the opening night needs to be – to the cinema audience anyway – a knockout in order not to seem a letdown. It’s absorbing and there are one or two revelatory elements – like Coulouris’s playing of Antony – but the overall effect is anti-climactic: it’s hard to feel part of the instant standing ovation the audience in the theatre (actually the Gaiety Theatre on the Isle of Man) gives the play. But, all in all, Me and Orson Welles is greatly enjoyable and in an unusual way – it’s entertaining but has a kind of feelgood sadness. The enjoyment comes in part from where and when the story is set (and I was glad that I knew something of the historical milieu – so that references to Harold Ross, Brooks Atkinson, ‘the goddam Lunts’ didn’t pass over my head in the volleys of quickfire dialogue). But it comes too from the felicitous teamwork that’s gone into the picture. Although 1937 seems essentially a lost world in Me and Orson Welles, the people who’ve made this film impart an excitement in creation and performance that makes them true inheritors of the Mercury Theatre tradition – and, to that extent, makes us feel the past really has been brought back to life.
6 December 2009
[1] This article is no longer available at the URL I referred to in 2009.