Movie Review: Me and Orson Welles (2009, Directed by Richard Linklater)

Oh, how glorious to be young, in love, and living in New York in 1937! Jazz was pouring through the streets. Poetry was flowing from the pens of young intellectuals in corner cafes. A young Orson Welles was staging revolutionary Shakespearean adaptations at the Mercury Theatre and ticking off most everyone he worked with in the process.

The strengths of Richard Linklater’s new film Me and Orson Welles, an account of a young teenager’s (Zach Effron) experience playing in a progressive Mercury Theatre production of Julius Caesar directed by the great Welles himself (Christian McCay), are the meticulously-staged recreations of Welles’ miraculously dramatic stage production. The audience, even looking through the eyes of 2009, cannot help but be blown away by the audacity and passion of Welles’ theatrical vision. No wonder critics and audiences alike were buzzing madly about Julius Caesar, saying that Shakespearean theatre would never be the same again.

As for the rest of the movie … not so much. Effron is passable as Welles’ young actor, but his relationships with two different women feel contrived and overly sentimentalized. The trajectory of Effron’s story doesn’t really make sense and in the end we’re left to wonder what the point of the whole thing was, other than to see moments of Welles’ theatrical genius.

I suppose McCay may be up for an Oscar for his portrayal of the young, yet already arrogant and voracious Welles. He does a credible job depicting the big guy, but doesn’t bring any new insight into the great man. As I said, though, it’s enough to simply sit back and enjoy the scenes from Welles’ Caesar. It’s the closest any of us will probably ever come to being there.