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December 16, 2009

ORSON WELLES AND MR. FOX

We had better go ahead and get used to Zac Efron being a big star. And why shouldn't he be? Unlike Shia Labeouf, he doesn't coast on being a mildly witty, kind of goofy-looking star of action movies. Efron is damn talented: he can sing, dance, and he's got the kind of matinee idol looks that transcend time: only the 70s would have been unkind to him, grouping him in with George Hamilton and all the Robert Redford wannabes who were shut out when the industry was looking for the next Dustin Hoffman.

Efron is better than inoffensive, worse than great in Richard Linklater's gloriously entertaining new film ME AND ORSON WELLES. He sings, smiles, and has a kind-of whiz-bang clean-cuttedness that hides his intentions always on the sly. But he and the always-boring Claire Danes are merely scenery for the best performance of the year from Christian McKay.

I know nothing about McKay; neither do you. Check out his IMDB profile - not even a supporting role on LAW AND ORDER. But he looks the part and gives it the necessary gusto. Welles is a force of nature, a boy genius who walks into the room with false humility only to vehemently prove he's smarter than everyone else. He's a master of two mediums (theater and radio), and the film closes as he sets his eyes on another (film). McKay dominates every scene he's in, and Linklater shoots him appropriately - the camera follows him, or the camera centers on him even as others are more pertinent to the context of the shot: it's as though Welles the character is implicitly directing the scene.

There's a rogue's gallery of long-forgotten actors and personalities, lovingly embodied on the surface without any unnecessary depth by Linklater: Norman Lloyd (later to become famous by falling off the Statue of Liberty in Hitchcock's Saboteur) is a ham; George Colouris (a Welles regular) is an arrogant neurotic; Joseph Cotten (who had a great run in the 40s) is a slick ladies man with a good heart. And there are dames, divas, and Guffman-esque critics to boot. But the movie belongs to McKay, and it's to Efron's credit that he lets him have it. The romantic intrigue plot is not what you'll come away talking about, but it doesn't make it a worse film: it allows us to see Welles in all his bluster and bravado. In that sense, it's a nice conceit.

Linklater is an interesting cat. DAZED AND CONFUSED is one of my favorite movies, but I'm only fond of a few of his others: not really big on the SUNRISE flicks (mumblecore does that so much better), thought SCHOOL OF ROCK was overrated, and FAST FOOD NATION an interesting misfire. But SLACKER (which spawned mumblecore, I get it), DAZED, WAKING LIFE, and A SCANNER DARKLY make a fascinating aimless canon: dreamy flicks about people wandering around and trying to figure out what it's all about without ever really getting there. I never would have thought he would have been up to the task of a period piece, particularly since he muffed THE NEWTON BOYS, but the result is an unfussy, energetic portrayal of a period and a scene. The final set-piece - Welles' contemporary revisioning of JULIUS CAESAR featuring fascists and a Mussolini-like Caesar - is accurately realized without ever calling attention to its own artifice.

So I'm happy to give one glowing recommendation (see it!); here's another. Surprise! I like Wes Anderson's latest movie - THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX. It's his funniest movie since BOTTLE ROCKET, and its charming without the rough edges of some of Anderson's best characters. Mr. Fox reminds me of the lovechild of Dignan and Royal Tenenbaum - he has the former's good nature and the latter's need to control things.

I've always thought a pretty typical, unheralded moment in Anderson's filmography is when Royal meets Chaz's kids at the playground. He sees their dog Buckley, and says, "Sit Buckley." Anderson always thrives on characters who like to plan events that might fail magnificently, who try to control that which utterly evades them: Dignan's cold-storage heist, Max Fischer's aquarium, Chaz's protection of his children, Francis' trip through India, Zissou's hunt for the Tiger Shark. Mr. Fox is no different, and that's probably what drew Anderson to Roald Dahl's lovely little book.

There's a joyful subversive sense of the radical here: Mr. Fox is stickin' it to the man and still unabashedly a hero. He's a fox who rejects no one - the animal kingdom has never seemed more democratic and communal. Even an evil rat has a poignant moment. And the father/son stuff, always more complex than it seems in Anderson, is just a nicely wrought here as it has been before.

But mostly this movie is funny. Every backdrop, song cue, and anthropomorphic personality is lovingly conceived; my personal favorite is Owen Wilson as a passive but brutally sincere polar bear coaching a sport too ridiculous to be described (it involves long division, and lighting a pine cone). And the constant digging is like something out of DIG DUG.

- My friend Jake wrote a much better review of ME AND ORSON WELLES on his blog - check it out.

http://thenighteditor.blogspot.com/2009/12/portrait-of-welles-as-young-man.html

| By Andytown | 10:56 PM

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Posted by: J. Pensak at December 26, 2009 2:25 PM

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