Citizen Kane

A+

Directed by Orson Welles

Widely considered the best American movie ever made often cited as the best film of all time, Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane" is a towering, almost larger than life film that looms gigantically over the landscape of cinema, casting a shadow over almost everything that came before and after it. Welles' film is an innovative gem that fully deserves its place as one of cinema's most venerated works.

After a large deposit of ore is discovered under his childhood home in Colorado, the young Charles Foster Kane is sent by his parents to be raised by Walter Parks Thatcher in Chicago. On his 25th birthday, Kane's family fortune is turned over to him in its entirety. Rather than continuing to build on the now diversified portfolio that is the Kane fortune, he rather decides to expend all his energies in building up a fledgling newspaper, The New York Daily Inquirer, into a national news powerhouse. The corrupting influence of greed and fortune soon contribute to making Hearts...uh, I mean Kane, into a power hungry, greedy recluse, hiding in the opulent confines of his palace, Xanadu.

I once heard a guy recall how he had gone to see "Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark" as a teen in 1981 and had left the theater speechless as the credits rolled, unable to fully understand what he had just seen. I imagine a similar, yet far more intense effect was felt by "Citizen Kane's" first audiences. When you consider what the movies being produced in the early 1940's looked like, Citizen Kane's arrival is akin to an F-16 screeching to a halt on a tarmac next to a bunch of biplanes readying to take off. Bad analogy, but you get my drift. Welles' film was so innovative and forward thinking that basically everything about it was new and, at the time of its release, still unheard of. Just in terms of cinematography, Welles and his director of photography Greg Toland developed a dizzying array of innovate camera effects and lens settings that did much to revolutionize the way films were shot. Even today, watching some of Welles' more famous "deep focus" shots (where characters and objects in the background are brought into focus at the same level as those in the foreground) is an eye popping experience. Welles and Toland's use of effects to tell Kane's story in an innovative and radical way is also amazing, especially knowing how much of "Citizen Kane" is actually a "special effect." As Roger Ebert states in his commentary to "Citizen Kane," most of the shots in Welles' film were special effects, so much so that special effects were probably used at a higher ratio in "Citizen Kane" than they were in "Star Wars." Astounding stuff, to say the least.

Despite being almost universally acclaimed, "Citizen Kane" has been attacked by a few adventurous critics for a perceived lack of emotional depth. Although some of these criticisms the work of attention starved blowhards like Ron Carney, the unquestionably awesome Ingmar Bergman once attacked "Citizen Kane" for what he saw was a vapid story devoid of any real emotional depth. I can't say I disagree with Bergman's criticism, at least to some extent. Although there are interesting questions raised in "Citizen Kane" about the potentially nefarious effects of power and the nature of possession and ownership (be it of a newspaper empire or a person, in Kane's case) I can't say that I've ever felt that "Citizen Kane" had anything that important to say and I can certainly see why a guy like Bergman, whose bread and butter was making films that almost demand moral introspection from their audience, might have taken offense and the praise showered upon Kane's film. Nevertheless, I think that Bergman and others who critize(d) "Kane" for its alleged shallowness are asking way too much from Welles' film. The fact of the matter is that no film, even those saddled with the "greatest ever" title, films such as Renoir's "Les Regles du Jeu" or Ozsu's "Tokyo Story" truly have it all. "Tokyo Story," for instance, was a landmark achievement in terms of depth and characterization but I would argue that technically it was nothing spectacularly different than the rest of Ozu's films (of course, many would disagree with this assessment, but I stick by it). The bottom line is that "Citizen Kane," despite maybe not having the emotional impact of "Wild Strawberries" or "Ikuru" or some other film that is supposed to make you reevaluate your life once you watch it, is considered great mostly for being such an innovative yet still accessible and engaging work. Welles didn't just roll out the effects and the snazy editing and dump it onto the laps of a quizzical audience. Rather, he made "Citizen Kane" into a work that had the ability to excite and engage audiences, as much still today as it did in 1941. The continued praise and reverence for "Citizen Kane" is due, more than anything else, to its remarkable timelesness.