Hey, folks. Capone in Chicago here, with a couple of films that are making their way into art houses around America this week or at least expanding to more theaters (maybe even taking up one whole screen at a multiplex near you). Enjoy…
ME AND ORSON WELLES
Sometimes you just watch a movie and wonder why no one has ever made a movie like it before. The subject of director Richard Linklater's latest gem is the move that the newly birthed Mercury Theater (led by rising radio star Orson Welles) made to bring Shakespeare--specifically "Julius Caesar"--to Broadway in 1937. The story is told through the eyes of 17-year-old would-be actor Richard Samuels (Zac Efron), who gutsily approaches the Mercury players while they are congregated outside the theater waiting for their marquee to get turned on. Welles (played with uncanny accuracy by British actor Christian McKay) is impressed with the young man's hubris and hires him to play the small role of Lucius opposite Welles' Brutus.
ME AND ORSON WELLES feels like it's not only attempting to capture the period it's set in, but it's also trying to capture the feel of films made in the time period. The rapid-fire dialogue, the classic elements of a backstage drama, and the slightly overplayed performances all perfectly blend into an energetic production whose pure entertainment value cannot be denied, if for no other reason that McKay's performance as Welles is terrifyingly on the money. I forgot in about two minutes that I was watching a movie with someone in it playing Welles; McKay simply becomes Welles, as both a boisterous dictator of a director and a philandering, sensitive soul with an endless arsenal of exactly the right words to get out of or into any situation. He's also an indisputable genius when it comes to directing, especially when it comes to Shakespeare, which (much like his film versions) he boils down to their absolute emotional essentials. The Mercury's 1937 production of "Julius Caesar" had the Romans in modern-day fascist wear and featured terrible examples of mob rule and political assassination. And Welles knew exactly how to make the play seem ultra-modern as well as timeless.
Even if the rest of the film was terrible, it would still be worth seeing for McKay's work. But fortunately, the rest of ME AND ORSON WELLES is quite good. Transitioning teen idol Efron brings the right balance of enthusiasm and innocence to Richard, who falls in love with office manager Sonja (Claire Danes), who seems like a great catch until we slowly realize she's a slave to her ambition to turn this thankless job into something more prominent. Sonja might be the most complex character in the film, and Danes holds back just enough in her portrayal to keep us wondering what Sonja will do next and with whom. Also doing fine work is Ben Chaplin as actor George Coulouris (Welles' Mark Antony), one of the few professionally trained actors in the production, and one of the most anxious. Zoe Kazan, who had such a great supporting part in REVOLUTIONARY ROAD, plays Gretta, a young woman Efron meets in a record store, and keeps running into at just the right moments in his life and hers. Eddie Marsan plays John Houseman, who runs the day-to-day operations of the theater and ends up doing most of the apologizing on Welles' behalf. I was charmed by James Tupper's role as actor Joseph Cotten (Publius), who befriends Richard as much to guide him through the minefield that is Welles' personality as anything.
Sure the love story between Richard and Sonja is cute and interesting, but really all I cared about is watching Welles pull his show together in an impossible timeframe. He rips apart scenes that don't work, he cuts superfluous words with hardly a second thought, and he fires or threatens to fire actors who disagree with him. As he puts it, "It's my store." One begins to believe Welles thought that about the entire world--or at least those who were brave/foolish enough to step in his line of sight while he's working. ME AND ORSON WELLES is a coming-of-age story about both Richard and about the Mercury Theater players, who went own to help Welles make CITIZEN KANE four years later. Welles was a man of mischief--as can be seen by a sequence in which he does a guest spot on a radio play and ends up improvising dialogue from the novel The Magnificent Ambersons, which Welles went on to direct a film version of after KANE--and he was a man who knew how to instill strength and confidence in others even if he had to use deceit to make that happen. This is the kind of film that is easy to get lost watching. From the sharp script by Holly Gent Palmo and Vincent Palmo Jr. (from the Robert Kaplow novel) to the rich directing by Linklater and the performances that never stop giving, ME AND ORSON WELLES is a great combination of fiction and history that is difficult to forget and so easy to love.
COLLAPSE
Critics are practically tripping over themselves trying to tell you just how scary this documentary of a man sitting in a chair, talking and smoking, really is. And the most bizarre thing about the subject of COLLAPSE, one Mr. Michael Ruppert, is that he's either one of the few human beings on the planet who has connected all the dots of the latter part of the 20th century and the first few years of the new one, or he's an alarmist conspiracy theorist, or perhaps he's both. The particular reason that his analysis of the world and America is so scary is that he's predicted several events accurately both in terms of what happened and how severely. For example, he predicted our current economic crisis, and the invasion of Iraq (his reasoning for both is sound and made me very anxious, as in, full of anxiety), and he has forecast some even scarier shit having to do with the end of the oil supply, population growth, and the eventual end of civilization as we know it. Now read that last part very carefully. Ruppert isn't saying we're all going to die; he's saying that literally civilization is going to evolve when oil runs out or become unaffordable. If this happens, how could it not? So all of those critics I mentioned earlier, the ones trying to tell you that what Ruppert has to say is like walking through an intellectual house of horrors? They were right.
Chris Smith (AMERICAN MOVIE, THE YES MEN) is one of my favorite documentary filimmakers, and he's basically entering into territory that Errol Morris typically tackles. Even the style of COLLAPSE is similar, with a haunting, almost-constant dark musical underscore and simply having Ruppert address the camera, while stock news footage is interspersed to illustrate his points. The cumulative effect is undeniable and nerve-wracking. While even one of Ruppert's ideas can give you reason to bite your nails, listening to him go from one paranoid outlook to another is almost more than our brains can process, and I suppose that's the point.
Ruppert dares us to question his deductions or results to date, but as we get deeper into his history (he was an LA cop who uncovered a CIA plot to sell drugs in American ghettos), we realize the amid all the gloom and doom, Ruppert also has an unflinching belief that Americans have the capacity to change the direction the country is going. But as he systematically goes through every conceivable kind of alternative energy source and essentially says that it takes more energy to produce them, thus making them useless, I almost find his optimism as difficult to believe as some of his predictions.
So here's the thing, if even 25 percent of what he's saying in COLLAPSE turns out to be accurate, we're in for a heap of bad times in the very near future. Ruppert makes it clear that he is not a conspiracy theorist, because his conspiracies are based on fact, and frankly it's tough to disprove a lot of what he's saying. His words could be elaborate scare tactics or they could be the blueprints for the biggest preventable holocaust the world has ever seen (his words). Either way, in an age where we get small handfuls of scary docs every year, COLLAPSE might be the one that keeps you in bed under the covers for weeks. In addition to the film slowly opening around the country, it is also currently available on Time Warner and Comcast cable Movies On Demand channels.
-- Capone
therealcapone@aintitcoolmail.com
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