Movie Review: Me and Orson Welles

LITTLE ROCK — Curiously inert but for the excellent (and accurately stagy) impersonation of Orson Welles by British stage actor Christian McKay, Me and Orson Welles is one Richard Linklater movie we can’t love unconditionally.

We don’t even love it conditionally, though it does serve to demonstrate that, like Stephen Soderbergh, Linklater is an excellent technical director who can seemingly divorce himself entirely from any subjective notion of style. Me and Orson Welles is such a well-realized, neutral production that we can almost believe the lack of chemistry between ingenue Zac Efron and the often delightful Claire Danes is some kind of artistic choice.

Oh well, the point is to hear and watch McKay-as-Welles bluster and fret and fill up the frame with his immense, unavoidable theatricality. You’ll probably walk away from this movie impressed by his plummy performance, and unsure of what else went on.

Well, it’s ostensibly a coming-of-age story about an aspiring teenage thespian (Efron) who gets a small part in Welles’ historical 1937 Mercury Theater production of Julius Caesar (which had the actors affecting black uniforms that evoked European fascists rather than to gas). For his trouble, he gets to be bullied by Welles, rub shoulders with actors like Joseph Cotten, be advised by producer John Houseman and have his heart busted by the ambitious office manager (Danes).

No doubt there’s something to be made of Welles’ undeniably important staging of Caesar, but the inherent cuteness of a script derived from a young adult novel is a dubious way to approach it. (For a better strategy, see Tim Robbins’ somewhat politically overbearing but still excellent 1999 film The Cradle Will Rock which was built around the Mercury Theater’s other 1937 production.)

Still, give Efron credit for at least trying to run with the big boys. And Linklater a pass for making what for him is a runof-the-mill movie. And McKay an Oscar nomination.