AT SLOPPY JOE’S: 2002 review of CITIZEN KANE

Citizen Kane: spoof biopic tracing the life of billionaire newspaper publisher Charles Foster Kane (Welles), from poverty-stricken rural childhood through to lonely old age in a vast, opulent Florida castle. Determined to solve the mystery of Kane’s dying word “Rosebud,” a newspaper editor sends reporter Thompson (William Alland) to track down key figures in the tempestuous life of the fiercely-ambitious but fatally-flawed magnate.
A fractured portrait of Kane’s private and public faces takes shape, with key testimony provided by Jed Leland (Joseph Cotten), his long-time friend and business associate, and by Kane’s second wife Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore). But while the reporter ends his quest no closer to unlocking the Rosebud mystery, the film’s final shot seems to provide the audience with the last piece in the Kane puzzle…

It’s ironically appropriate that the exalted reputation of Citizen Kane (which so relentlessly lays bare the reality behind its central figure’s looming public image) should itself be based partly on a lie. Or, more accurately, on misconceptions and shoddy reporting. Every ten years Sight and Sound magazine polls the world’s leading film critics for their all-time top ten movies, and from 1962 to 2002 Citizen Kane has been the most frequently named title.

This is the main basis behind the Welles picture’s habitual “greatest film” tag—but in the 1992 poll, only 43 out of 132 critics included it anywhere in their lists. Which means that more than two thirds of critics wouldn’t even put Citizen Kane in their top ten. Admittedly, if any film does deserve the burden of wearing the “greatest film” crown on the basis of such polling, this is the one: the next most cited film in 1992 was Jean Renoir’s La Règle du jeu with 32 votes. But the Sight and Sound poll is, if anything, surely an argument against naming any one title as the “greatest”—until the unlikely day that a film makes it into a majority of the ballots cast.

The mystique surrounding Citizen Kane is, in itself, a strong piece of evidence against the practice of compiling any such “best ever” lists in the Sight and Sound mode. It’s all but impossible to settle down and watch this film with anything approaching fresh eyes, so heavily does its oppressive reputation weigh on every frame. This is unfortunate, because Citizen Kane is an unexpectedly light-hearted, even jaunty enterprise. It’s very much a very young man’s film, the result of a 25-year-old director being let loose on the film-making medium and, like Charles Foster Kane on his newspaper, gleefully trying everything he can think of just to see what happens.

When Welles hits his directorial stride, the effect is exhilarating (the larky March of Time montage that opens the film is at least as stunning as more recent, knock-em-sideways expositional prologues like Magnolia, The Royal Tenenbaums, and Amelie.) But there’s an inevitably price to pay in terms of consistency: when the energy sags, as it intermittently must, Citizen Kane can suddenly seem like very hard work, its deficiencies becoming more noticeable.

After a while the viewer may start to wonder exactly what lies behind Welles’ virtuoso skill. There’s a show-off quality to Citizen Kane, as if the brash director is determined to push established film-syntax as far as it can go. But to what purpose? What is Welles’ motivation, his aim with Kane? There is, perhaps, some degree of contempt in the way he so facilely throws off his tricks: contempt for the medium and, by extension, for audiences who insist on treating cinema as a serious dramatic form, in which ideas and emotions can be explored. What is this film actually about? Is this even an especially interesting or worthwhile story?

Welles’ superb, charismatic central performance and anything-goes direction (along with Gregg Toland’s similarly innovative cinematography and Robert Wise’s razor-sharp editing) means that Kane is, superficially at least, a delight to watch. So much so that one can almost—but not quite—overlook the rickety script, on which Welles collaborated with Herman J Mankiewicz (exactly who did what has been a source of endless tedious debate).

At one point Jed Leland, gently mocking his former friend’s “pleasure dome” Xanadu, feigns forgetfulness about the mansion’s grand name: “Whats it called, now? Shangri-La… Eldorado… Sloppy Joe’s?” It’s perhaps the neatest bit of pomposity-piercing in the whole enterprise—which is itself more than a little sloppy from time to time, despite its portentous title. It’s hard to think of another film, for instance, in which the deaths of the main character’s wife and only child are mentioned only en passant, and so briefly that this crucial detail may not even register at all with many viewers.

The script is much more concerned with compiling witty lines than with tackling serious issues—be they political or psychological. It’s clever, but seldom intelligent, packed with cheap jibes at the expense of the real Kane (William Randolph Hearst)—even “Rosebud” is a crudely opportunistic gag, this being Hearst’s pet name for part of his mistress’s genitalia. Citizen Kane, then, revolves around nothing more or less than a dirty joke.

But the joke is very much on us. The film has built up a quite unwarranted head of critical steam, one that bends over backwards in its attempt to converts its flaws into touches of Wellesian genius. Just as Susan spends her hours compiling a jigsaw puzzle, Thompson and Welles construct their vision of Charles Foster Kane. But it’s an incomplete picture, with several gaping holes at the centre. Citizen Kane devotees, of course, buy the film’s inbuilt apologias wholesale: the notion that we can never know anyone, especially any public figure, meaning the reporter’s quest was always an exercise in futility.

Welles makes it clear that Kane was seldom anything other than a hollow vessel, an impressive self-made construct with nothing inside. Just like Citizen Kane: a dazzling, precocious achievement, but one which pales when placed alongside a genuinely great film of genuine, adult substance… Welles’ own Touch of Evil, perhaps?

Neil Young
1st October, 2002
(seen 21st April, Ritz Cinema, Thirsk)