Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles

Orson Welles is one of the most fascinating, entertaining, and tragic figures in cinema. He's the subject of so many show-biz anecdotes and scholarly books with different and contradictory theses that it’s impossible to know exactly who he was as either a man or an artist. Welles himself was such a fanciful storyteller that even a study of all the interviews he gave and public appearances he made can’t provide a complete, or completely accurate, picture. Given such rich and complicated subject matter, it's perhaps inevitable that Magician, a 90-minute documentary with the all-encompassing subtitle The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles is a letdown.

At Magician's helm is Chuck Workman, a director and editor who makes brilliant short films but whose full-length features often disappoint. His archival montages of movie moments, which he creates for museums and for the Oscar telecasts (including those between 1988 to 2008—the award show's golden years), are so artfully composed, meticulously researched, and inventively constructed they have literally taken my breath away on more than one occasion. Place Workman’s movie-moment compilations next to anyone else’s, especially the countless “supercuts” slapped together for YouTube by nameless hacks, and the craftsmanship behind his output is unmistakable. But Workman’s features, which, like his shorter works, compile hundreds of film fragments in quick succession, are exhausting.  The pacing and structure of films like Superstar: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol (1990), The Source: The Story of the Beats and the Beat Generation (1999), and What Is Cinema? (2013), frequently confuse and disorient viewers, causing us to miss key points or even draw false conclusions. And the clips in these longer films often seem less judiciously chosen—at times even seeming to contradict the narration they accompany.

Magician suffers from many of these issues. Though it's a serviceable introduction to Welles, I can't imagine it being of much interest to those unfamiliar with him and his work, and not already convinced of his importance as a filmmaker, artist, actor, and showman. Meanwhile for those already acquainted with the basic details of Welles’s biography, the picture’s rapid pace and lack of depth will likely prove frustrating. Rather than probe into his mythic origins, his spectacular exploits in theater and radio, and the tragic arc of his rise and fall in Hollywood, the movie feels more like cut-and-dry biographical Cliffs Notes (or more appropriately “Clip-Notes” which is an apt way to describe Workman’s style of montage filmmaking). We get pithy interviews with knowledgeable critics and historians like Jonathan Rosenbaum and Joseph McBride, the directors Peter Bogdanovich and Henry Jaglom, who were friends of Welles, and the actor, director, and author Simon Cowell, whose ongoing, multi-volume biography represents, in my view, the best writing yet done on the man . But Workman doesn't offer a well-rounded perspective on what it was like to know Welles or work with him, choosing instead to let his subject speak for himself via composites of snippets and sound bites from interviews conducted at various points in Welles’s life. These statements, jokes, and anecdotal fragments quickly begin to blur together. Workman overloads the viewer by presenting multiple pieces of information at once—layering on-screen titles on top of text from articles and reviews, accompanied by voice-overs, and often underscored with sound from Welles’s pictures. The result is an unruly and frequently off-putting hodgepodge.

The film becomes more compelling in its final third, when Workman turns his attention to Welles's overlooked late career and the end of his life. There are strong sequences about Chimes at Midnight, the director’s greatest cinematic Shakespeare adaptation; some amusing asides, like a montage in which he eats and holds forth about food; and a too-brief but touching interview with his longtime companion Oja Kodar, one of the people who knew him best. You can sense the enthusiasm of Workman and his producers for exploring this latter-day material, and they clearly want more people to understand that Welles continued to create amazing work, though much of it unfinished or unscreenable due to legal disputes, right up until his death in 1985. I share their zeal, and I wish Workman had found a way to make a feature-length documentary covering only the later chapters in this great artist’s life, which have been sorely neglected, at least on film. Alas – Magician has the flat structure of a typical A&E-style biography, which touches all the important bases of an entertainer’s life in chronological order but offers few new or compelling insights.

The opportunity feels especially wasted because this film could have been a counterpart or response to Michael Epstein and Thomas Lennon's The Battle Over Citizen Kane, the 1996 documentary that I consider to be the definitive film on Welles to date. Though Epstein and Lennon's movie only covers Welles's life until the release of Citizen Kane, his first and best-known picture, it's a masterpiece of clear, informative, enthralling talking-head documentary filmmaking. I may lose some credibility for praising Battle so highly, derided as it is by many scholars and critics who accuse it of drawing simplistic and false parallels between Welles and William Randolph Hearst, Citizen Kane's putative subject. But I don’t think Epstein and Lennon intend to use the twinned biographical approach they employ in their film to draw deep psychological conclusions about the two men’s similarities. I see it instead as a structural device, and a very good one, in that it paints the richest picture of each man yet put on film. The range of people Epstein and Lennon interview, and the extended scope of both their stories and Welles’s own (told with footage from many of the same interview’s Workman pulls from) are deeply engaging. 

Unfortunately, this isn't the case with the comparatively bland and unsightly Magician. Workman doesn’t seem able to or interested in obtaining his clips from the best possible sources. Of course, much of the interview footage in this movie comes from 1970s TV talk shows, but many of the film excerpts also look like they’re derived from television transfers, rather than obtained from the best available archival material. This sloppy look does a disservice to the magisterially visual filmmaker to whom it purports to pay homage.