Me & Orson Welles
Cinema Nova, 23/08/2010
Status: Behind by 7 (and a half) films
The last time I saw ZAC EFRON, he was over-playing it as a young Simon Tam in Joss Whedon’s Firefly. I blinked (for eight years) and now he’s a superstar? Man, do kids grow up fast these days.
In (ever-diverse, always-impressive) RICHARD LINKLATER’s Me and Orson Welles, Efron plays the “me”, a seventeen year old high school student who bluffs his way onto the cast of the Mercury Theatre’s Julius Caesar, a production that will set the rising star of its director and lead, Orson Welles (CHRISTIAN McKAY). If they can get the damn production together, that is.
Although I understand the film tracks a pivotal and much-romanticized event for fans of theatre, film and/or Welles, it doesn’t feel very staid or beholden to anything that’s come before. The very fine cast (including CLARE DAINES, BEN CHAPLIN, The Truth About Cats and Dogs and EDDIE MARSAN, Happy-go-lucky) not so much impersonate the real characters as channel them.
This is a seriously well-made movie. Linklater obviously has not only a great interest in the era (and recreates it with beautifully lived-in detail), but also a great interest in the volatile drive of a genius - and all its frightening potential to create great art and yet destroy people. He’s also got a lovely, whimsical not-quite-nostalgia for youth - maybe more like an interest in observing the moment when innocence is lost and youth gives way to wisdom (or, in Efron’s case, to stardom).
