I don't see what's so special

Rating: 9/10 (17 January 1999)

The first time I saw Citizen Kane must have been a little more than a year ago. I, a devoted film lover, took it upon myself to see the "Greatest Film of All Time" just so I could really consider myself an expert. Of course, I didn't agree with the gazillions of critics and film buffs on the quality of the film after my first viewing. But, I was positive that I had missed something, and that I would have to see it again to appreciate its excellence. So first, I took a few months to catch up to classic film history. (I must have seen a third of the films on the AFI's 100 Greatest Films List since the program aired last spring.) And, I honestly appreciated most of the old films that I saw, e.g It's a Wonderful Life, Psycho, High Noon, and the modern masterpieces that are already some of my favorites, e.g. Pulp Fiction, Fargo, Forrest Gump, Schindler's List.
So, after I felt I had learned something about classic cinema, I had a second viewing of Citizen Kane---and I had the same feeling about the film. Good writing, good camerawork, good expression of moods, but, the film has no juice. It takes us on this journey with Charles Kane. It manipulates us so we know some things about him, and then we don't, and we hate him, and then we like him, but the biggest problem is we don't understand him. We don't feel with him. How can a film's protaganist be someone who is not understood by the viewer? It just doesn't work. The protaganist in a movie should be someone who we feel with, laugh with, and cry with-as in Rocky. In the end, Citizen Kane tries to move us with the story of a boy who gets estranged from his family, a man whose dreams were crushed by fate, and in the much talked-about ending, a man whose childhood ended abruptly with his sled. Citizen Kane, although great in its own right, is not a masterpiece, and Orson Welles would have done a better job if he had portrayed Charles Foster Kane the way that Francis Ford Coppola portrayed Michael Corleone-a truly tragic figure.