Magi­cian: The Aston­ish­ing Life and Work of Orson Welles

There is a cer­tain amount of slack you can cut a fawn­ing hagiog­ra­phy of Orson Welles, because the over­whelm­ing and cer­tain­ly cred­i­ble evi­dence is that he was a pret­ty awe­some fel­low. Direct­ed by a man called Chuck Work­man (and it’s a film which real­ly lives up to that name), Magi­cian: The Aston­ish­ing Life and Work of Orson Welles couldn’t be more nuts and bolts if ram-raid­ed B&Q in a mon­ster truck. A pres­tige, lin­ear retelling of the actor-director-raconteur-gourmand’s life which he would have – if his on-screen per­sona is to be believed – obvi­ous­ly despised for its drab con­ven­tion­al­i­ty, the film is a stan­dard mix of gush­ing archive inter­views and snip­pets from his movies, many of which were nev­er com­plet­ed dur­ing his lifetime.

The trag­ic arc sees Welles direct­ing Cit­i­zen Kane at the age of 22, scor­ing a mod­est suc­cess at the time of release, and then nev­er being trust­ed with anoth­er pic­ture again. Work­man explores the bit­ter irony of an indus­try which held him up as a pudgy poster­boy for cin­e­mat­ic inno­va­tion and the real­i­ty of Hol­ly­wood film­mak­ing as a high art­form, and yet finan­cial­ly black­balling him from being a paid-up mem­ber of the club. Much of his late life was spent scrab­bling for mon­ey wher­ev­er he could find it, daisy-chain­ing between talk­shows, com­e­dy roasts and back­slap­ping drink-ups, and then head­ing back to Europe to make high­ly idio­syn­crat­ic art movies which, with the gift of hind­sight, were as rev­o­lu­tion­ary and bril­liant as those hal­lowed ear­ly works.

As with most com­men­tary on Welles, Work­man rolls out the old reg­u­lars – Hen­ry Jaglom, Peter Bog­danovich, biog­ra­ph­er Joseph McBride – and a few super­fans – Mar­tin Scors­ese, Richard Lin­klater – and awk­ward­ly fits the pieces togeth­er. Many of the inter­views in the film are not even new – the doc­u­men­tary equiv­a­lent of dredg­ing up old stock footage. New­ly filmed sequences, such as the Todd The­atre in Wood­stock, Illi­nois, alleged to be the first boards the actor ever trod, look rushed an ama­teur­ish, and one lat­er piece of footage at the Munich Film Archive looks like it was shot on an anti­quat­ed cam­era phone from a mov­ing rac­ing car.

If you know absolute­ly noth­ing about Orson Welles, you’d prob­a­bly do bet­ter to watch his exist­ing movies, in order, and then once you’re done with that, just watch them all again. And besides, Welles capped his career of with the best and most hon­est auto­bi­og­ra­phy one could ever ask for: it’s a film called F for Fake.