Brightest Young Things

Some actors dive entirely into their roles, and some actors define them by their own movie-stardom. This dichotomy isn't news, but it's unusual to see two perfect examples of the form acting opposite each-other, and even more ironical for it to happen in a movie about actors and acting.

I had no idea who Zac Efron was when I walked into the theater, so I watched this movie all wrong. Here is the plot as I understood it:

A creepy young man ditches high school and miraculously menaces his way into a ragtag but extremely high profile staging of Julius Caesar in Manhattan of the 30s. Said production is directed by radio personality Orson Welles (played, unaccountably, by a young Orson Welles back from the grave) who is a brilliant manipulative asshole. The young actor, who loves acting so much that he has no other discernible backstory, bumbles, forgets his lines, and seems ready to murder everyone at every moment, but is unquestionably adored by the director and his sexy assistant Claire Danes as played by Claire Danes, ostensibly cuz of his moxie, but secretly because they are frightened of his dark magic. The production suffers countless contrived dramatic setbacks, and so do we. Orson is dick to all and wins because that's what happened in history. In the end everyone triumphs in the business bittersweetly, except the kid, who turns instead to a life of murdering lonely shitty women writers in back alleys (off camera but implied).

This reading of the movie was entirely based on his resemblance to noted psychopath Christian Bale, at least in the eyebrow area. After the movie someone (a girl) pointed me to Efron's clean-cut heartthrob image, as well as the fact that Orson Welles was in fact played by a complete unknown Englander named Christian McKay who looks and sounds exactly like Orson Welles. Not as in 'Jamie's wearing sunglasses or 'Jim Carey controls his face for once', but as in 'walking around his house in his PJs drinking hot choocys in Shropshire and still look/sounding like the motherfucker' seriously that level of inhabitance. Claire Danes, despite her trying to seem vampish and worldy all over this, is still Claire Danes.

So after reflection the movie (directed without a lot of fuss by former iconoclast Richard Linklater in the role of off-screen Woody Allen), is a meditation on stardom and the anxiety of influence. I was supposed to see Orson Welles as the first proto-celebrity aware of his own image, and Efron as playing way against type as someone who is not super-famous. I was supposed to read Welles' flowery and duplicitous assurances of Zac's natural acting genius as both a send-up of the cynical sycophants who surround real life ZE as well as a perfectly reasonable assessment of the mega-stars talent at playing a boy genius actor aka himself, and NOT the result of his obscene black-eyed hypnotism. And lastly I was intended to read McKay's unspeakably perfect and delightful impression of skinny OW as itself a tribute to the nascent craft of method acting described here and there throughout the film.

Why you should go see this movie: Orson Welles is still the best movie star of all time. He made a lot of almost-great movies, and no-totally great ones except the ones in which he played himself: Citizen Kane and F For Fake (or in Transformers the Movie as the voice of Unicron). In the end this might go down as the biggest and best meta-ironic trick performed by the old huckster ever--making a movie in which he stars as a spirit inhabiting the body of a completely different person 50 years younger than him as this medium demolishes the skills of the teenage tween-masturbation-target who ostensibly is the focus of both the film, the reviews, and the on-screen (if not on-stage) drama--which demolition takes place in the scenes where Welles is disingenuously mentoring Efron into doing his bidding by praising the very acting chops that McKay is exploding with all over his face and and oof phew I need a glass of water.

Surely Mr. Linklater did not mean for this to be the greatest pleasure of his film, watching Efron get the shit kicked out of him by the corpse of a demi-god, but that's show business folks! See you next time.