Great Technique Fails to Hide Dull Subject

Rating: 8/10 (9 June 2007)

Citizen Kane is one of the great technical milestones in the history of film. It is also a rather dull film that fails to involve the viewer on any but a technical level. The innovative cinematography far outshines the ordinary subject matter and the viewer is never viscerally engaged. The movie is cold and slow.
1. The first flaw is Kane. The whole film is built around an examination of the life of this character, but he is neither very important nor very interesting. William Randolph Hearst, the inspiration for Kane, is a minor historical figure in retrospect, as even the movie makes clear. Comparisions to Kubla Khan and talk of an "empire upon an empire" ring hollow. Kane has some influence but no real power. He fails to secure high office. He pumps for the Spanish-American War but opposes American entry into World War I. In each case, the decision for war is made by others. Thirty-seven newspapers and a radio station is hardly an empire and Kane lacks even the muscle to put a singer over with a skeptical public.
Nor is Kane an out-sized and fascinating character such as General Patton in the movie "Patton". Kane says early in the movie that he might have been great without money, but we see nothing to indicate that this assessment reflects anything but blind ego. It is only his inherited wealth which props him up at all. He is a failure as a politician. He is a failure as a businessman. He is a failure in his personal life. He is surrounded by talentless sycophants.
2. Kane is never put into the context of his times. This is a major failing of the movie. What do we actually learn about the United States from the 1890's to 1941. Race is swept utterly under the rug. The only black faces to be seen are stereotypical servants and musicians. What about the social issues of the time? Did Kane support prohibition? Did he favor immigration? Oppose lynching? What about women's rights? We find out nothing about his views, other that in some way his political collapse set back the cause of reform, apparently because he ran against "corruption".
3. The script leaves critical areas of Kane's life and character blank and unexplored. He becomes a father. The movie does not show us his response to the birth of a son, nor what sort of dreams and hopes he invests in the boy. We never see how he reacts to his son's death or the impact this tragedy has on him. The birth and death of an only child should be pivotal and life-altering events. They are thrown away in this movie.
4. The acting is in and out. Agnes Moorehead, Ray Collins, Ruth Warrick, and Paul Stewart are excellent in small parts. Others, such as Erskine Sanford, overact. Everett Sloane is convincing as an old man. Joseph Cotton is not, and is poorly made up. Dorothy Comingore is strident and off-putting as Susan. Welles himself is often striking, but is undercut by poor makeup in some later scenes. Neither the characters, not the acting, except for Welles, linger in the memory.
5. The character of Kane is pretty well-sketched in halfway or two- thirds of the way through the movie. We know all we are going to know or perhaps care to know, but the movie lumbers on, with Kane sinking from merely arrogant to grotesque. The transition from the bright, promising, if perhaps unexceptional, young man, to the bizarre old recluse in a marble palace is shown, but not explained, and frankly, I thought the scenes at Xanadu were over-the-top.
All in all, a masterpiece of technique that deserves credit for striving for a more adult spin than most movies of its era, but a movie, which, ironically, has dated more than the less ambitious, accomplished, or artistic, rivals from that era.