According to Christopher Nolan’s excellent film The Prestige, every good magic trick has three parts. First is the pledge, when the magician shows the audience a normal, everyday object. The turn follows, when the magician manipulates the ordinary object to do something extraordinary. People marvel at the turn but, according to the movie, the mark of the truly great trick is still to come: the prestige, when the magician restores the object to its original state.
Interesting, then, that Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles tells a story in the opposite sequence. The beginning of Welles’s life was certainly the part that would be associated with prestige, as he was called a prodigy of acting, then produced a radio drama so compelling that many people committed suicide in fright, and then directed and starred in what has often been considered the greatest film of all time. After that, his career took a turn. He was a famous, bankable actor, yet his passion was directing avant garde films that never made much at the box office. The two sides of his career grew more and more irreconcilable until, toward the end of his life, Welles was in his pledge stage: normal and everyday. He was a cynical celebrity, trading on his fame by making commercials and going on talk shows.
“Magician” is a fitting moniker for Welles, as he was so concerned throughout his career with honesty and trickery. His famous, deadly production of “War of the Worlds” was, in a sense, a magic trick using the medium of radio to make the audience believe something extraordinary. One of his last films, F for Fake, made a sort of bookend with that project by meditating on fraud and lies. And Welles told the story many times of tricking a producer into financing a play by enthusing over a book he wanted to adapt, when actually he’d never read the book. Magician reveals that the story was untrue. It was a lie about a lie.
But that lie also reveals one of the fascinating elements of Welles’s career. In spite of all his creativity as a storyteller, the stories he told were almost all adaptations of others’ works. Citizen Kane was an original story he wrote with a partner, though infamously based on the life of William Randolph Hearst. But from then on his attention was given to others’ stories. For instance, he made several films of Shakespeare’s plays, giving them an impressionist visual flair. For his Hollywood-outsider status and financial struggles, Welles is considered the godfather of independent cinema. But most indy directors today work to tell their own stories.
One exception to that rule, of course, is documentaries like this one. Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles mixes clips from Welles’s films and interview footage from Welles himself and people who knew and loved him. The director, Chuck Workman, is able to use pieces of Welles’s late-career talk show appearances to construct a coherent sense of the man’s own perspective on his life. This has the odd effect of making the film feel autobiographical.
Orson Welles truly did have an astonishing life and career, and Magician relays the story well. Consider: Citizen Kane was the first film he made, came out when he was 26 years old, and has been the most influential film in all the years since then. He never again had the creative freedom that he had on Kane, and most would say he never again approached the brilliance of that first film. Thinking about him as a creator inspires me to worship God as Creator all the more. Even the greatest human artists have to compromise their visions and scrounge for resources, and they remain unsatisfied with their success. God, on the other hand, speaks his pure vision into reality, creates in an infinite medium, and will see his creation through to a glorious end.