The Distinguished Citizen ...

Rating: 10/10 (13 June 2005)

There is a telling moment in CITIZEN KANE that quietly reveals a lot about what makes the film great. It is a scene set in the dark days of the Great Depression, where Kane is turning over much of his empire to his arch-nemesis, Thatcher. As they talk, Kane casually walks away from the camera and we suddenly discover that the room the men are in is an illusion. The background wall that looks to be right behind the them is actually twenty or thirty feet away, the window sill isn't at waist height, but actually is over Kane's head. The room is huge and Kane is dwarfed by his surroundings. Kane than walks back toward the camera and perspective again creates an illusionary intimate image.
It is a neat camera trick and KANE is full of neat camera tricks. It discretely plays with our perception of reality, just as the story does. Through out, Charles Foster Kane is at a distance and slightly out of focus and then he is up close and personal; he is larger than life and suddenly small and petty; he is always at the center of the picture, yet concedes the foreground to the various witnesses who tell his story. CITIZEN KANE is a treasure chest of cinematic gadgets and gizmos; yet as deliciously stylized as KANE is, the style meshes perfectly with the content. CITIZEN KANE is a story of illusions and perceptions told through illusions and perceptions.
Before KANE, and for the most part afterward, no film has quite taken hold of the medium of film and done so much with it. Other directors have tried to dazzle us with how cleverly stylish they can make their films, but usually the effect is self-consciously arty: Every rabbit pulled out of a hat is greeted with a drum roll and a fanfare. The beauty of KANE and the reason director Orson Welles remains an artist of awed respect, arise from the casual grace with which he performed his magic tricks. His rabbits are in themselves so fascinating that how he produces them is only of secondary interest. Yet for a film obsessed with stylistic trickery, CITIZEN KANE still manages to be an incredibly personal story.
To say a film is efficient may seem like a backhanded compliment, but part of the wonder of KANE is that it tells so much story and covers so much territory on a B-movie budget. It is an epic created on sound stages and with editorial mosaics. Welles begins his film with a mock newsreel obituary announcing Kane's passing, then basically repeats aspects of that same story several times over from different perspectives, maintaining a vague chronology, but jumping around in time to let us know that there is more to a life than the mere passage of time. Welles tells us who Kane was to the world, then who he was to the people who actually knew him -- suggesting that who we are is defined not by what we have done but by who we have touched. It is one of the most effective and insightful film biographies that was ever made. The fact that it is a biography of a fictional character is totally irrelevant.
The essence of CITIZEN KANE is the fable of the blind men and the elephant. Like the blind men, who, upon examining only a part of the beast, assume that the elephant is a rope (the tail), a tree (a leg), a sword (a tusk), etc., the witnesses to Kane's life see him as a spoiled child, an idealist, a hypocrite, a monster and so on and so forth. All are correct, yet all are wrong, only seeing in Kane what they want to see. We never meet Kane the man, only Kane the illusion, yet we end up with a vague grasp of who he must have been. If CITIZEN KANE offers any universal truth it is that a life -- or a movie -- is more than the sum of the parts.
Even given all the well-deserved praise proffered to Welles as a director, he never seems to get his due as an actor. His embodiment of Charles Foster Kane is, simply put, one of the great screen performances of all time. We remember that KANE saw Welles as a first time director, but it was also his first time on screen professionally and he gives a performance that is both self-assured and subtle, bold and bemused. Taking Kane from his twenties to his sunset years without a false note, giving a performance that combines gentle humor with grandiose theatrics, Welles creates a character of shifting moods and conflicting motives, yet always consistently believable. In later years, Welles perfected his persona of larger-than-life bluster and wounded arrogance, on screen and off, but he never again got a chance to play a character of such complexity and nuance.
KANE's status as "the greatest film ever made" is always being challenged, defended and debated, yet it is remarkable how seldom the film itself is imitated. Despite being given this perfect blueprint for how to film a biography, it is rare that any film attempts to break free of the this-happened-that-happened style of storytelling. It is as if the legendary stature of the film intimidates others.
Hitchcock once said that film is life with all the dull parts edited out. Welles adheres to this and goes one better: CITIZEN KANE is all highlights and underlined passages, a Cliff Notes biography of sorts. Does this allow us to get to know the real Charles Foster Kane? Well, yes, and no. We are allowed to solve the mystery of "Rosebud," but Kane the man remains just out of our reach. We never really meet Charles Foster Kane, only his shadows. Welles and screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz give us pieces of a puzzle, but the pieces are not all from the same puzzle.