Me and Orson Welles
Director: Richard Linklater
Can there possibly be anyone out there who’s an ardent fan both of the current teenage heart-throb best known for playing Troy Bolton in the High School Musical franchise and the wayward 20th century genius who gave us Citizen Kane? If so, this hypothetical individual will feel Christmas has come a little early if Me and Orson Welles – in which the heart-throb (Zac Efron) is the “Me” and Christian McKay plays Welles – arrives in cinemas. Set over the course of one implausibly incident-packed week in November 1937 and based on Robert Kaplow’s novel, Me and Orson Welles follows greenhorn high-school kid Richard (Efron) as he stumbles into a supporting role in Welles’ radical Broadway adaptation of Julius Caesar. He’s cast as a lute-player in a scene which, as the director airily informs him with his trademark jocular intellectualism, is there to “humanise” the character of Brutus.
And this movie goes to considerable pains to “humanise” a man who, during his lifetime, seldom missed an opportunity to inflate his own, unique life-story to mythical proportions. It’s a process that has continued posthumously over the past 20 years, thanks to various biographies and fictionalised appearances in movies.
Nominal lead Efron is inevitably overshadowed by McKay, a big-screen debutant who nails Welles’ distinctive vocal intonations – rumbling baritone with a hint of a Mephistophelean chuckle – and gets by passably looks-wise even if, at 35, he’s in theory a decade-and-a-half too old for the part. Because Welles was barely 21 in November 1937 –making him only a couple of years older than our wet-behind-the-ears hero, whom he invariably patronises as “Junior.”
The bizarre disjoint between Welles’ calendar-age and his vaulting creative precocity is never really examined. Holly Gent Palmo’s screenplay is much more concerned with (fictional) Richard’s painful sentimental education. Observing at first hand how exploitatively Welles – whose sexual appetites match his gastronomic and intellectual voracity – abuses his position of power, Richard glimpses the idol’s clay feet at the same time as he starts to grasp his own limitations.
Me and Orson Welles is competently handled – you’d certainly never guess it was actually shot on the Isle of Man – and nicely played by the ensemble (Claire Danes, Eddie Marsan, Ben Chaplin), but is essentially a minor affair from an over-busy director. The picture has been knocking quite innocuously around the film festival circuit since premiering at Toronto in September 2008 and now pops into cinemas to cash in on Efron’s popularity and position McKay for “awards-season” consideration. Both aims are understandable, but a tad optimistic.
Neil Young
