A Hugely Boastful Celebration of Style

Rating: 10/10 (25 July 2007)

Citizen Kane is a film that has a lot of unprecedented stylistic freedom in terms of the time in which it was made, and that would of course cause an impact upon release. Orson Welles worked in radio and theatre. He was not practiced in film. This was his first. But all the imagination and passion he had in creating images on radio and in his mind were depicted as ambitiously as they could be in Citizen Kane. It begins with a news reel, then with a scene with several men wherein we never see their faces, but their silhouettes. We see points of view from inside a snow dome and cranking in on us through solid objects like windows and screens and people. Kane has something a lot of movies, even great ones, don't have, and that's raw vision. Raw vision is great, because it's entirely personal.
The problem is that Welles made such an overwhelming effort to announce his presence both in front of the camera and behind it that the film's story is of secondary importance, subordinated by his main concern which is how differently it is told. I speak objectively, I believe, as I did not live during a generation that was so directly impacted by the film's revisioning of cinema. I am accustomed to films by directors who did and in turn managed to heavily influence mine. I find its widely hailed position as the #1 greatest movie of all time to be the most grandiose excess of praise of which I can readily think. There are many scores of movies from the 1940s that hold up much better over time. That is not to say that Kane is corny or archaic by today's standards but that the vulnerability of unused audiences to being blindsided by its style and ambition is much less perceptible. I must not be in such a small group who sees the tremendous self-importance and braggadocio exclusively exuded by Welles.
Are you not the biggest ham in the world if you make a film debut as a writer/director who casts himself in the role of extremely rich tycoon Charles Foster Kane who dies in his gaping mammoth mansion Xanadu, before which uttering his last word which reporters and producers obsess over trying to understand?
Welles is extraordinarily smug and narcissistic, but he does very much know himself, because Kane is really not so much written with William Randolph Hearst in mind as he is with Welles himself in mind, and his life came to eerily resemble Kane's.