Me and Orson Welles

I had a wonderful time at Richard Linklater's Me and Orson Welles, a valentine to the theater, particularly the can-do spirit of the Mercury Theater, the company founded by Orson Welles and John Houseman in 1937. The film is full of zest and period atmosphere, and is nothing more than a trifle, but is very tasty.

At the heart of the film is Christian McKay's performance as Welles, the incomparable genius who had already made a name for himself as a radio actor and the director of two famous New York productions: the "voodoo" MacBeth and Marc Blitzstein's opera The Cradle Will Rock (which itself was the basis of Tim Robbins' film of the same name). Welles, using the money he earned from radio, formed his own company with Houseman (who later earned a spot in American culture history as a spokesman for Smith-Barney) as his producer. Their first production was Julius Caesar using modern dress and setting the play in the very contemporary jack-booted world of European fascism.

That's the setting, but the story is told through the eyes of a high school boy, Zac Efron. He lives somewhere in the suburbs, but trains into the city to absorb the wonders of culture. He happens across the theater a week before the opening and manages to charm Welles into getting a small role (he says he can play the ukulele, a bluff, and Welles seems to know it but doesn't care). Thus we get a tried and true plot device--the vision of a great man seen from someone of the periphery, which has been used in such diverse films from Ben and Me to The Stunt Man.

Efron becomes friendly with the cast, some of whom, like Joseph Cotten and Norman Lloyd, would go on to make names for themselves. He is sweet on the theater's office manager, sparklingly played by Claire Danes, and its easy for us to vicariously feel the giddiness of what it must have been like for him, as the company, under Welles mercurial brilliance, struggle to get things ready for opening night.

McKay, a British actor, is a bit too old for the part (Welles, one must keep reminding one's self, was only 22 during the events depicted) but otherwise gives a titanic performance. He has Welles' voice down pat, as well as the moon-face and quicksilver eyes, but also manages to embody the largeness of the man's intellect, as well as the failings of his personality. A lot of the details are amusing, such as the way he rides an ambulance around town or how he improvised speeches during live radio broadcasts (sometimes lifting unattributed passages from Booth Tarkington), as well as his mammoth ego.

Efron, to his credit, provides a character that serves mostly as eavesdropper--nothing takes place that Efron is not witness to. I admire that a big star in the teen world took on a low-key project such as this, and he's spot-on. Danes plays the girl who any guy working in the theater would love to meet. There's also wonderful performances by Ben Chaplin, James Tupper, Eddie Marsan and Leo Bill as other members of the cast and staff.

Where the film is less successful is a framing device involving Efron meeting a young would-be writer, played winningly by Zoe Kazan (granddaughter of Elia). These scenes were surely intended as a grounding for Efron's character, who after all is a fictional character who doesn't become a big acting star, but they seemed a bit tacked on and unpersuasive. Perhaps, during these scenes, I was just anxious for the action to return to the theater, which made me remember my days of long ago, when there was no better place to be than an empty stage, just before rehearsal.