Charles Foster Kane was not entirely good or bad. This mystery surrounding him makes Citizen Kane a masterpiece.

Rating: 10/10 (21 April 2012)

Having completed the core story mode of Team Bondi's LA Noire a night before watching Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, I realized the non-linear viewpoint narrative was common in both the game and the movie. There were crucial decisions to be made in LA Noire that could wrongfully prosecute an innocent or acquit a criminal, and the information we had about them was majorly through third party sources. In Citizen Kane, the first twenty minutes of so, with the exception of the mysterious opening shot, presents Charles Foster Kane as an wealthy, ostentatious and over-ambitious business tycoon whose life has seen major ups-and-downs and whose final years were spent predictably behind the walls of his palace like many other wealthy magnates. The media's perspective is not completely spurious, in fact Kane is wealthy, highly ambitious and grandiose, but that is not how his life should be defined or confined to. The 'Rosebud' puzzle leads to a week long investigation by a journalist Jerry Thompson in which he meets those close to Kane who are still alive.
Thompson accosts Kane's ex-second wife Susan who takes to drinks after the news, but is dismissed by the melancholic singer. After perusing through Kane's manuscript, all he gets is an insight of Kane's early days. The disgruntled reporter quips at the librarian whether she is Rosebud, after an unsuccessful search. After meeting Mr. Bernstein, a jolly friend of Kane's, Thompson gets to hear more of the tycoon's rise as at the Inquiry publication. On the other hand, a bitter Jedediah Leland, Kane's good friend who had parted ways with him over the years, presents Kane in a rather divisive light, highlighting the mogul's unreasonable nature. Jed is also more concerned about himself and his cigars than Kane and requests Thompson to sneak in a few. The third person to be interviewed is a now-calm Susan, who discusses about her failed marriage with Kane. The last person who discloses about Kane is the butler. What we get from all these events is not an entirely accurate description of Kane; there are inconsistencies regarding his character that may be due to the narrator's own prejudices. Take for example Kane's first marriage as told by Leland, where Kane and his wife are only seen chatting about Kane's busy schedule in the most ridiculous outfits; by satirizing the interaction instead of including dramatic encounters between husband and wife, Welles stresses the unreliability of the events. And this is precisely what makes Citizen Kane such a captivating watch.
The elusiveness of the story is elevated by the thrilling and brilliant cinematography that plays beautifully with dark and light. The opening Rosebud sequence is memorable because of the use of montage at various levels that give the scene a touch of disquietude and confusion. The five minutes boost the rest of the movie in a way rarely seen in film. Generally, a majority of the films believe in a placid opening that establishes all the characters before injecting some suspense. The extensive display of dissolve, montage and deep focus work magically, taking us through the many years of Kane's life. I haven't done film studies yet, but I can tell you that there is some intelligent camera work here, such as when Kane and Bernstein are discussing about the distinguished employees in their rival newspaper Chronicle and the camera closes in on the photo and dissolves to the nest frame where we see the same men working for Kane! Or the famous scene where a young Kane is playing with his little sledge in the snow outside while his parents are negotiating with Mr. Thatcher. Or the frequent shifting where Kane is reveling with the ladies towards the back while Leland expresses doubt to Bernstein in the front.
Orson Welles plays a proud, charismatic and larger-than-life Kane in his youth and a megalomaniacal distressed Kane in his final years. Apart from acting the lead role, he has co-written, directed and produced the film; there is nothing to complain here, he excels in all the departments, and I can forgive the stiffness that robotizes his body movements when he plays the older Kane. The supporting cast is fine, Joseph Cotten, Ruth Warrick, Moorehead in particular while Dorothy Comingore was inconsistent.
Citizen Kane is a film that treats us, invites us and invades us till we are keen to watch it another time, not to find more about rosebud, but to get a deeper understanding of Charles Foster Kane. We may never be able to fully appraise his life, but we keep hoping that we join all the jigsaw pieces one day and find out who Charles really was and what made him that man he became. This deliberate shroud that keeps us piqued all the time about the person is what was missing in 2011s Iron Lady, a recent movie about an important albeit non-fictional political figure Margaret Thatcher's life. Phyllida Lloyd never used the camera to give Thatcher this ambiguity that her character required and never gave importance to any other character in the film, and Abi Morgan, the scriptwriter could not give anything except one-liners and aphorisms. A 1941 film showed continuity and sequence better than a 2011 film, and that's something remarkable.
My Rating: 9.7 out of 10