Movie Review: Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles

This year I taught back to back semesters of Introduction to Film, and each semester left me with the same essential conundrum. How do I explain, to students who are only barely older than the 21^st century, why Citizen Kane is such an important film? The lessons and techniques that Kane gave to filmmakers have become so totally enmeshed into the production of films that it is often difficult to explain to students that these techniques had to be invented. You mean films didn’t always have depth of field? So what if you could see the ceilings, ceilings are all over the place, this room has a ceiling… I die a little every time.

So, I suspect, does Chuck Workman—whose work you are probably most familiar with from the Academy Awards (he frequently is the one who directs the In Memoriam segment of the show). For Workman, who won an Academy Award himself in 1999 for the short “Precious Images,” Welles is a deeply underappreciated figure, a genius on the level of Mozart—who unlocked for an unsuspecting world the vast possibilities of his art form. This has been a recent theme for Workman, who since 1999 has made three full length films, all concerned, in one way or another, with the history of, and advances in, film-making. Perhaps all of the time spend memorializing cinema’s departed has sharpened his sense of nostalgia, because Magician is a film that seems to be deeply nostalgic for a kind of filmmaking that is increasingly being supplanted by computer generated imagery—the filmmaking of camera and stock, a magical alchemy of nitrate and light, elements that Welles wielded like a wizard.

If there is any great failing in Magician, it is that it fails, largely, to impress hard enough the degree to which Welles’ genius transcended the film form. This is understandable enough, if we understand Workman to be writing a love letter to cinematic form, but it doesn’t work as well for a biography of Welles. Welles made great films, but Welles was not a great filmmaker. He was a cross-disciplinary artist. The greatest practitioner of the dramatic arts of the 20^th century: he was the finest stage actor, the most innovative stage producer, the most visionary set designer, the greatest film director, and, if Ricky Jay is to be believed, perhaps the greatest sleight of hand magician in the world. Whereas Mozart had he failed to discover music would have likely been a totally inconsequential figure (his letters and the accounts of those who knew him do not paint an impressive picture), Welles would have simply found another venue had he been born into a world without cinema. He was more like Da Vinci than he was like Mozart, and so one can’t be too harsh in evaluating any film for not fully doing him justice.

Overall Rating: 3.5/4