Stunningly well directed, full of interesting shots and camera angles and scenes, and it looks (and sounds) terrific. But it’s a boring story. I know it was recut, and it shouldn’t have been – but even if it hadn’t it just would have been a more fully realised version of a boring story. I can’t believe anyone would care about a useless rich family, with sulky George (Tim Holt) and his nice pretty mother (Dolores Costello) who is nonetheless weak enough not to marry a man she loves, even 20 years later, because of family opposition. You can’t quite figure out why Joseph Cotten or Anne Baxter, both of whom seem like nice sensible people, want to be involved apart from the fact they are so boring maybe they find the Ambersons exciting in comparison.
The story of the redemption of a brat is normally sure fire in Hollywood – Tom Cruise built his career on it – but we never get to see anything nice about Holt, except for him being nice to his mother while she’s dying (he still doesn’t let her see Cotten which is unforgivable) – and the new improved Holt never does anything. Holt’s performance has produced mixed critical response over the years; I think it’s fine – petulant, believable, all that (Welles himself would have had too much authority to play the role) – it’s just not much of a character. You don’t really care what happens to him. Or anyone in the film, for that matter. Costello is weak for having not stood up for her family to marry Cotten, especially the second time around (you never get a sense of the close ties that bind her and Holt), Baxter is silly for getting involved with such a loser, Cotten is Mr charming and diplomacy but we never see him do anything sensible.
Defenders of this film blame RKO and Robert Wise – but even if the film had been presented in its original version it still would have been a boring story about uninteresting people. Again Welles defenders would probably argue that “he wasn’t interested in playing Hollywood games with sympathetic protagonists and all that” – but protagonists don’t have to be sympathetic, they just have to do something, or have interesting things happen to them. At least Charles Foster Kane built newspapers and tried to promote his wife as an opera star; these guys just go on picnics and dance and lose money and invent things off screen.
For all his genius as a director, Welles wasn’t much of a screenwriter, and I think on this one he was sidetracked by his determination to recreate his childhood. Watching it you can’t help wish if only Welles (those three words again) had picked something with a stronger narrative drive for this second film, like Dracula, or Heart of Darkness or Julius Caesar. Of course it was a tragedy that the film was cut about to such a degree but I'm sorry this has been massively over-rated by people who love the romance of its destruction.
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