Kane falls down in second half

Rating: 8/10 (29 October 2007)

It's difficult criticizing a movie that's hailed as the greatest movie of all time. From the standpoint of cinematography, it might just deserve all the accolades that have been heaped upon it all these years. But my specific bone to pick with Citizen Kane is a story line that kind of runs out of gas.
Orson Welles said that 'Kane' was not specifically about William Randolph Hearst but represents a sort of composite portrait of the rise and fall of a prominent American in the public eye. But one can see clearly that Welles had it in for Hearst. So much of the first half of the movie (up until the midpoint) is reminiscent of Hearst. And indeed it is the most compelling part of the picture. Up until half-way through Kane we feel that Welles is really being fair to his Kane-Hearst character who's depicted as charming but also capable of acts of megalomania. It's this multi-dimensional portrait throughout the first half that really grips our attention. Plot wise the stakes are raised until Kane's thunderous fall from grace when he's caught in a "love nest" with the "singer". This is the setup for the second half of Act 2 of the script leading to the 'point of no return' when Kane flips out after his second wife leaves him.
Welles was faced with a big problem in the second half of his script—what to do with main character? The first half is so believable because it is based on the events of a real person's life. But when Welles looked to Hearst for inspiration for the second half of his movie, there really were few compelling conflicts LEFT for him to latch on to. In real life, Hearst continued to publish his newspaper, was sort of a recluse who didn't reveal much about his private life and did NOT have a bad relationship with the woman who he was involved with (in contrast to the relationship between the fictional Susan Alexander and Charles Foster Kane). So what did Welles do? He decided to create a false portrait of Hearst, a veritable straw man, which he could easily shoot down. Welles, the Hollywood 'progressive' now went into battle as the standard bearer, slaying the 'reactionary' Hearst. Kane-Hearst loses his charm and basically becomes almost completely unlikable in the second half of the movie. Welles grafts a 'character flaw' on to Kane-Hearst based on a man named McCormick, a Chicago heir who promoted the singing career of his no-talent mistress which is reflected in the Susan Alexander Kane story arc.
By falsely depicting Kane-Hearst as a violent man obsessed with trivial pursuits, we no longer see a character who is multi-faceted. This is Welles deceiving himself that he's 'better' than William Randolph Hearst (despite Welles's disingenuous claims that the character was not really based on Hearst.)
Citizen Kane is really the harbinger of things to come for Orson Welles's career—a career that ran the gamut from profound inspiration to adolescent narcissism. Technically Citizen Kane was probably the greatest film ever made and full of sensational performances. But at the same time Welles's elitist point of view and simple inability to follow through to complete a story full of great promise diminishes the overall impact of an American classic.