Me and Orson Welles movie review (2009)

Oh, he had an ego. He once came to appear at Chicago's Auditorium Theatre. A snowstorm shut down the city, but he was able to get to the theater from his nearby hotel. At curtain time, he stepped before the handful of people who had been able to attend. "Good evening," he said. "I am Orson Welles -- director, producer; actor; impresario; writer; artist; magician; star of stage, screen and radio, and a pretty fair singer. Why are there so many of me, and so few of you?"

Richard Linklater's "Me and Orson Welles" is one of the best movies about the theater I've ever seen, and one of the few to relish the resentment so many of Welles' collaborators felt for the Great Man. He was such a multitasker that while staging his famous Mercury Theatre productions on Broadway, he also starred in several radio programs, carried on an active social life and sometimes napped by commuting between jobs in a hired ambulance. Much of the day for a Welles cast member was occupied in simply waiting for him to turn up at the theater.

Most viewers of this film will not necessarily know a lot about Welles' biography. There's no need to. Everything is here in context. The film involves the Mercury's first production, a "Julius Caesar" set in Mussolini's Italy. It sees this enterprise through the eyes of Richard Samuels (Zac Efron), a young actor who is hired as a mascot by Welles, and somehow rises to a speaking role. He is star-struck and yet self-possessed and emboldened by a sudden romance that overtakes him with a Mercury cohort, Sonja Jones (Claire Danes).

The film is steeped in theater lore. The impossible hours, the rehearsals, the gossip, the intrigue, the hazards of stage trap doors, the quirks of personalities, the egos, the imbalance of a star surrounded entirely by supporting actors -- supporting on stage and in life.

Many of the familiar originals are represented here, not least Joseph Cotton (James Tupper), who co-starred with Welles in "Citizen Kane" and "The Third Man." Here is John Houseman (Eddie Marsan, not bulky enough but evocative), who was Welles' long-suffering producer. And the actor George Coulouris (Ben Chaplin), who played Mr. Thatcher in "Kane." All at the beginning, all in embryo, all promised by Welles they would make history. They believed him, and they did.

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