A testament to the power of cinema, and the power of art

Rating: 10/10 (22 January 2002)

`Citizen Kane' is a film that begins with the death of a man's body and ends with the cremation of his soul. It is a story that is told through the memories of several people who each know only bits and pieces of Charles Foster Kane; none of them can honestly say they know him as a complete human being. The only thing they are all sure of is that Kane is a man who wanted something he could never give: love. The moment he left his mother's boarding house, his whole life became preoccupied with money, scandal, and politics. There was never room for anything else.
`It's probably a very simple thing,' says a newspaper editor in response to Kane's final spoken word: `Rosebud.' We have just seen a newsreel that chronicles, on a very superficial level, the life of one of the world richest and most powerful men. The images of his huge mansion being built, complete with swimming pools, tennis courts, gardens, and zoos, sharply contrast with the dark, gloomy, empty atmosphere that was presented at the beginning of the film and will be seen again at the end. Xanadu is now a ruin, a broken home for a broken man. The testimonies of Kane's friends and family strip away the gloss provided by the newsreel, documenting the emotional spiral downward for one of America's most influential people.
Kane mistakenly believes that the best way to win love from another person is through controlling them. This is best seen in the scenes where he tries, like Professor Higgins from Shaw's `Pygmalion,' to make his second wife an opera star. Of course, he could also be doing this to make her more `respectable,' so she can be placed on a pedestal like his first wife, who was the President's niece. But by this point in the film, it is clear that Kane is a very lonely man at heart, and desperately needs the honest affection of another person. He has become aware of the emptiness of his possessions.
Kane's anger towards his loneliness grows into an impassioned fury, and he tears apart his room in a scene that ends by partially repeating what we have seen in the opening: he finds a glass globe with the image of a shack in it, holds it for a second, and says `Rosebud.' Then he walks away, the last we will see of him in the film. Baffled, the reporters leave his Xanadu as its contents are being either sold off or burned. One of them refers to their unsuccessful search as `playing with a jigsaw;' they have found every piece but one. The camera pans past the statues, jewelry, antiques, and valuables to see the `scrap' items that have no monetary value being burned away. Among them is Rosebud itself, the sled Kane loved playing with as a child; earlier in the film, when he was visiting Susan Alexander for the first time, he mentioned having just traveled back from his mother's funeral with a few of his childhood possessions. Rosebud was one of those toys, the last thing Kane was holding on to before being dragged away into a life of gold and silver. Love, after all, is something that cannot be bought or sold.
Perhaps, then, Kane really had the ability to love the entire time. He just couldn't use it because it was buried beneath everything he had bought with his earnings. When Kane cries out for his sled in his dying breath, he is pleading for a return to the innocence of his childhood, before his life became a whirl of buying and spending. For all his financial and social power, Kane only wanted what every human being needs.
`Citizen Kane' is frequently ranked by critics and audiences as the greatest film of all time, or at least somewhere in the top five. It received the `no. 1' crown by the American Film Institute when they named their 100 favorites, which impressed me since I thought they would go the sentimental route and put `Gone With the Wind' or `Star Wars' at the top (although I was still a bit upset that none of Welles' other films, including `The Magnificent Ambersons' and `Touch of Evil,' made the list). Personally, I'm not sure what my `all-time' favorite movie is; I have seen many great films in my twenty years, and sorting them out in some kind of precise order is already too difficult. But there is no doubt in my mind that Welles' masterpiece is one of the truly mesmerizing achievements of cinema, right up there with Kurosawa's `Seven Samurai,' Renoir's `Grand Illusion,' Tarkovsky's `Andrei Rublev,' Bergman's `Wild Strawberries,' Disney's `Fantasia,' Truffaut's `Jules and Jim,' and my childhood favorite, the Technicolor classic `The Thief of Bagdad.' It is one of those few films that always has something new up its sleeve every time you watch it, a different present for each member of the audience.