Evolving Orson

Having experienced P.T. Anderson’s extraordinary There Will Be Blood the other night, I feel like I’ve been through something of an Orson Welles revival at the tail of the 2007 moviegoing season, with three films somehow evoking and, to varying degrees, building on the legendary filmmaker’s legacy.

While a number of critics have compared the story of Daniel Plainview’s rise and dissolution (as channeled by Daniel Day-Lewis) to that of Welles’ Charles Foster Kane, there seems a lot in common between Joe Wright’s adaptation of Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Orson’s studio-mutilated sophomore pic, The Magnificent Ambersons. Both are tales of true love tragically impeded by a jealous youth and class strictures, and in both the key blocking moment happens at the entrance to a great manse where the non-aristocrat is blocked from entering.

Ditto some of what has long been described as Welles' mise en scène, his famous long takes where the camera, in Ambersons, navigated the space of a formal dance, picking up on characters here and there in elegant rococo movements bringing us deeper into the action than audiences had been before that time. In place of Welles' high society scene there's the remarkable, sweeping 5 ½ minute take on the beach at Dunkirk where the British army is in retreat, perhaps intended as a mirror on the famous Ambersons shot -- the flip side of a civilization at its highest by taking us so vividly through a nation's lowest point.

Then there's the comeuppance, which in Ambersons happens mainly via voiceover (in the studio version), as Welles tells us that Georgie Amberson finally learned is lesson. Not to give too much away, but there's a similar description of "atonement" summing up Wright's picture, albeit with a screen translation of McEwan's literary twist.

The Coen Bros extravagantly down & dirty adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men arguably echoes Welles’ wild border town corruption movie, Touch of Evil. Welles essentially took a "low" exploitation form and imbued it with Shakespearean qualities, some of which have taken the most recent reconstructive "director's cut" to come fully clear. I've read all sorts of elevated metaphoric readings of the Coens' movie, which at its heart is a very effective, brutal, suspenseful chase. But just as with the Welles movie, it is an evocation of extreme evil, albeit with a Terminator-like hitman as the unstoppably destructive specimen under the lens rather than a corrupt Southern sheriff. Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh's relentless movement motivates the camera tracking much like Welles' Hank Quinlan, both fascinated and aghast at what we are presented.

Both movies run long takes following the pressurized characters across borders and through border towns, into sleazy motels and across unforgiving landscapes. Both seduce high-brow audiences by implicitly offering the elevation of the tawdry and violent. Both end with the finish of a lawman, if in very different ways.

Which brings us back to There Will Be Blood. While the method of cutting abruptly in and out of stark white-on-black titles and scoring the picture with eerie futuristic sounds is more reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick (maybe the foremost cinematic disciple of Orson Welles to date), the story echoes that of Citizen Kane.

Both are epic tales spanning long years of monumentally ambitious men who make mutilating sacrifices of their humanity -- or maybe are emotionally mutilated to start -- in pursuit of material greatness. While hollowed out of love and prone to bullying, we find ourselves rooting for Daniel Plainview and Charles Foster Kane when they are up against the business establishment, those who would seek to belittle or conquer them. Cinematically, both use deep focus to draw us into their vividly breathing historical worlds. And both are dominated by a towering performance, around which everything else revolves like satellites.

But where upon repeated examination Citizen Kane reveals the driving motivation behind the man, the sudden truncation of mother love (and the hermeneutic object that last stood between the boy and separation from that love) leaving a gaping hole that he desperately tries to fill with the fickle love of the public, Anderson offers a different motivation for his man.

As a filmmaker known for his father issues both in his films and certain interviews, he shows us Plainview at his most kind when protecting a little girl from being beaten by her father, a clue that maybe Plainview's world-sized shoulder chip may be from a similar upbringing. Psychologically, if this is indeed the case, Plainview ends up replicating such behavior in a comic-horrific manner as befits the title.

If there is an echo of the young Charlie Kane in Anderson's movie it is not Plainview but his adopted son, H.W., who fits the bill. He's the innocent who loses his natural father early on, but has more father-love to lose down the line. Any hope in the movie comes from him, maybe more forgiving that Welles for it.

So if this thesis is correct, why the reemergence of the Welles influence all at once now? Maybe it's the renewed interest in Welles from a few years back, including HBO's dramatization of the making of that first milestone, RKO 281, or the similarly timed DVD packaging of a restored Kane print along with the documentary that the HBO movie was based upon.

Or maybe its just that the shadow of the man, with his topsy-turvy moviemaking career and penchant for getting into trouble as he made the grandest, most daring movies of his time has never left us, his legacy one to be grappled with from generation to generation.

Orson triumphant.