Impersonators
Me and Orson Welles, Julia, Every Little Step (2009)
Me and Orson Welles lacks that snide undertone that can be found in even some of Richard Linklater’s best movies, it’s one of his most pleasurable pictures: a criss-crossing of two well-established numbers, the “putting on a show” and the “day a gifted boy tastes real-life for the first time”. Its formula, but formula gives Linklater a chart, a destination, and room to give each moment that contained, fully-felt, none-too-rushed quality that he developed in his earlier pictures. The script, by Vincent and Holly Palmo, helps too: the requisite coming of age moments are light and charming and none-too-obtrusive, giving the brilliant Christian McKay (as Welles) room to shoot sparks that we generally find in more original movies.
Orson Welles, professional genius and legend, is one of those roles that can straight-jacket performers, its too tempting to retrospectively fawn. (I enjoyed Liev Schreiber’s attempt even if I never for one moment thought of him as Orson Welles.) McKay manages something destined to be taken somewhat for granted: he gives an eerily precise impersonation that’s an actual performance. This Orson, this madly talented young man feasting on idolatry and flesh and everything else, is also a full, contradictory human haunted and driven by not-quite-tangibles that would eventually contribute to his professional undoing (as opposed to most of us, who’re undone quietly). Inside Me and Orson Welles, this formula picture, is one of the least sentimental portraits of a legend I’ve seen that also happens to be entirely without judgment. Linklater’s pacing and McKay’s flamboyancy and wit (it’s meta-flamboyancy – flamboyancy as a comment on the smoke and mirrors behind said flamboyancy) give this Welles flesh and blood. There are two or three special moments, particularly Welles with his Mark Antony (Ben Chaplin, also better than ever) before their first show, a sketch of a director as nurse hen – his ego giving him the strength of an understanding human being even if it’s only just a means to an end.
Julia, written and directed by Erick Zonca (The Dreamlife of Angels), is one of those occasional shock waves that rewards dozens of underwhelming movies, and, for sure, the advertising promises another fashionably drab movie about the miseries of the grotesque working class. Julia (Tilda Swinton) is a fall-down drunk, barely employed, who gets involved in a kidnapping scheme that spirals wildly out of control, with episodes that play like a drunk’s most paranoid fears of retribution. The charms of Swinton’s unconventionally sexy intangible ice bird routine are generally lost on me, but she’s a revelation here: paunchy, paler than ever, make-up smeared in believably unflattering morning-after embarrassments, Swinton is direct, subtle, pared down, and funny in a desperate, sideways way that strikes me as far truer than Iñárritu’s condescending banalities. Swinton shows us notes other than “miserable”, “self-absorbed”, and “poor”; her Julia is smarter beyond even her knowledge (her vocabulary tips us off to that) and the originality of the picture is that her (unforgivable) indiscretions free her to become the person that everyone preaches to her to become. Julia is the most twisted redemption fable since Head On.
Julia (like Head On) is powerful because it, without pulling thematic strings, puts us on the same emotional plane as people we would normally deeply loathe. We accept Julia’s violations as distortion of something that’s undeniably universally human. Oscar bait pretends to do this all the time, but Julia lacks convenient filters of morality. When Julia runs over an innocent person and grabs a child and tosses him in the trunk, we cringe and flinch partially out of disapproval and partially because we want her to get away with it – we, and this confliction will bother people, respect her self-awareness and utility for survival. The picture has two amazing moments: a bonding between Julia and the child that has a disquietingly sexual undertone (Swinton has never been as beautiful), and a finale, a moment of enlightenment, of cathartic, ironic power. Swinton isn’t phoning prestige in here, she means it, and she is clearly one of our major actresses.
Every Little Step isn’t terribly revealing in a nut/bolts of production sense, but it reaffirms something folks (including me) take far too much for granted: the courage and commitment of even marginal performers we never meet or know, or of those who never even acquire the priviledge of calling themselves “performer”. I’m writing this piece comfortably from a little coffee/wine cove with beautiful women and sweet smells and tastes. The stars of Every Little Step are stretching and starving and toning and audtioning and practicing, practicing, practicing, for a shot at the latest production of A Chorus Line. The parallel of the subject matter of the show and its real-life aspiring performers is highlighted with audio recordings of creator Michael Bennett colloborating with tortured people who would inspire the characters the current actors are auditioning to become. The picture is minor but moving and human.
