Me and Orson Welles and Me

Q: What connects Christian McKay, Liev Schreiber, Angus Macfadyen and Vincent D'Onofrio?



A: All four have played Orson Welles on screen in Me and Orson Welles, RKO 281, Rock the Cradle and Ed Wood, respectively. The other three give fine performances, but McKay's is something rather special. It's balanced brilliantly - in the way that Michael Sheen so often manages - so that it has elements, strong ones, of an impersonation, but remains throughout a fully realised performance. For those - and there are many of us - whose attraction to Welles veers between fascination and obsession, it is an irresistible film, directed by the always interesting Richard Linklater and adapted from a novel with the winsome premise of a young man falling by chance into the world of the Mercury Repertory company in New York City and landing a small but key role in their famous modern dress version of Julius Caesar. At the film's heart (although it is in theory a star vehicle for the likeable Zac Efron of High School Musical fame and infamy) is a performance that is so beautifully pitched, perfectly capturing Welles's innate - and carefully studied - brand of charisma, that it continually threatens to unbalance the story. You just miss him when he's not on screen and McKay (although strangely overlooked in the Golden Globes) should push Christoph Waltz close in the Best Supporting Actor category at the Baftas and, presumably, the Academy Awards (and more on Inglourious Basterds in an upcoming posting). Me and Orson Welles offers an intimate, generally convincing portrait of theatrical life, there's a strong supporting cast several of them playing familiar faces from Welles's stage and screen repertory companies - Norman Lloyd, Geourge Coulouris, Joseph Cotten, John Houseman - but it's somehow not a wholly substantial film and what makes it so very enjoyable is McKay and the set-pieces that he dominates - and the one in which he brings his young protege for company to a radio recording is as entertaining a sequence as has made it to the screen in recent months. The film leaves you wanting more of the same from him. In fact Orson Welles fanatics and fantasists will be hoping that someone somewhere, and an obvious candidate would be Todd Haynes, bringing to the project something of the spirit of both Far from Heaven and I'm Not There, might be inspired to create a full-scale biopic.



Q: What connects McKay, Welles, James Mason and Jason Robards?

The answer to the question in the last posting was that each have played the role of the one-eyed lawman Rooster Cogburn in True Grit, Wayne winning an Oscar in the original (he also starred in the 1975 sequel Rooster Cogburn), Oates in the 1978 TV movie, and Bridges in a second remake due for release later this year.