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Me and Orson Welles (12A)
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Dir. Richard Linklater, Country, Year, 114 mins
Cast: Zac Efron, Christian McKay, Claire Danes, Ben Chaplin
Review by Carol Allen
The "me" of the title is teenager Richard (Zac Efron), who through an accidental meeting with the super talented and then young actor/director, lands himself a small part in Welles's ground breaking production of "Julius Caesar" at the Mercury Theatre in New York in 1937.
One thing Linklater is always good at, even though he's been doing it for years and is now pushing 50, is identifying with and communicating the enthusiasm, passion and energy of being young, when the world is your oyster to be cracked open and you believe you can do anything. He does it again here in the characters of Richard and the other young people in the story, including Orson himself, who was only 22 at the time. It was only two years later that he began work on his cinema classic "Citizen Kane". It is delightful for example to see Richard as a thirties teenager showing the same enthusiasm for sheet music and the melodies of Richard Rodgers that young people would today for the latest indy rock band.
The film is set is what was a fascinating and important time in the performing arts at the now legendary Mercury Theatre, fuelled by the young Welles's talent and the experience of his older producer, John Houseman (Eddie Marsan). The influence of Welle's directing technique, as in this production of "Julius Caesar" and others he did at the Mercury, was still being felt in theatre in the sixties. And this is a great story idea, telling as it does the events of the film from the point of view of Richard, a humble "spear carrier" in the show.
Efron proves in this that he's much more than a High School Musical pin up. He holds the centre of the film playing a teenager from your grandparents' era, with whom young people today can identify. For Richard this is a true coming of age experience. He learns about sex from Danes as Welles's ambitious and charming young assistant, but an "older woman" to Richard, who captures both his attention and his virginity and he learns about art and the unpredictability of genius from his often tricky relationship with Orson. While sometimes seeming a little old for the role of the 22 year old wunderkind, McKay as Welles captures what we understand as the young Orson's charisma, arrogance, charm, vanity and ruthless dedication. In a first class supporting cast Chaplin is a delight as the very English actor George Coulouris, who plays Mark Antony in the show and who offstage keeps banging on about his classical training at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. And though he doesn't have a lot to do, James Tupper is the spitting image of Joseph Cotton, playing a minor stage role at this very early stage of his career.
Though set in the world of New York theatre, this is a UK film, which was shot on the Isle of Man, where it manages to convincingly recreate the Big Apple that we know from movies of the time, many of which were themselves, like this one, shot on sets built to represent New York. The auditorium of the island's restored Gaiety Theatre in the role of the Mercury is perhaps a little smarter in the auditorium than the real Mercury would have been but the small stage and the backstage area are just right, while the scenes recreated from Wells' production of "Julius Caesar" are both very impressive and give us a good idea of the impact the production must have had at the time. This is in fact a great film for theatre lovers.
One of the things which it is important to convey in a period film is the fact that to the people living at that time, these are modern times, this has never happened before and this is an exciting time to be alive, when new ideas are being born. In this Linklater succeeds in spades. As one of the young people says at the end of the film, "It's all ahead of us", as indeed for them it was.
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