Citizen Kane (1941)

rating: *****

the story: Family comes into money, boy is sent to grow up rich, spends his life disappointed with the results.

what it's all about: What to say about Citizen Kane that hasn't already been said?  If it's not indeed the greatest movie ever made, it's at least the first evidence that film is a medium capable of producing great art.  We live in an era, now, that alternately worships popular art and fringe art, and there's very little room to laude anything in-between.  Popular art makes all the money at the box office, and fringe art wins all the awards.  It's absurd.  And then we have Citizen Kane.  I think it would be equally doomed today as it was when William Randolph Hearst realized Orson Welles had based a large chunk of it on his life.  Hearst effectively blacklisted Welles from Hollywood, as an untethered voice, and declared that art, in Hollywood, came with a price.  The studios, then and again now, liked their iron grip, regardless of the results (which is not to say the results must always be construed negatively), and were happy to balk at someone like Welles, who challenged them.  In the '60s a whole generation of directors came about to expand the legacy of Citizen Kane, a movement that crested in the '90s, when smaller studios realized they had power, too, in wielding such creative forces, and set about believing they were more important.  But in art, it is always the artist, and the artist will always be remembered.  You can push an artist to greatness, but as evidenced by The Agony and the Ecstasy, you will find yourself hard-pressed to be remembered positively for it.

Anyway, what about the movie itself?  Beyond the visionary techniques?  What about the story itself?  What does it ultimately say?  One of the most overt things about it is that Charles Foster Kane doesn't love others so much as yearns for them to love him.  This is one of those things Kane subverts about the tenets of storytelling: he tells more than he shows. He's too busy showing the opulence to bother with rules.  He understands that telling is showing, because it reveals the heart of the human experience, since for the subject of his movie, showing was telling, and no one wanted to look.  His mother, his father, and the man who would raise Charlie didn't care about the pleasure he took from the mere act of having fun with "Rosebud."  His mother is cold and distant when we see her, resigned to the decision she made, and rationalizing it by demonizing the father.  She suggests that he's a physical threat to their son, but he's really an emotional one, as far as she's concerned; Charlie's dad hates the idea of his son being sent away.  And Charlie himself hates it.  But his rebellion is a subtle one, against the system he's meant to embrace.  He becomes a newspaper publisher, and he revels in chaos.  He would love the modern age. 

I am absolutely saying Citizen Kane is more relevant in 2018 than possibly ever before.  In the movie, Charlie straddles the 19th and 20th centuries.  We forget about the plague of anarchists from that time.  We can identify terrorists, and what motivates them, in the 21st, but anarchists?  They assassinated a president and an archduke, and they reached the height of their powers in sparking the first world war.  We gloss over these things in our rush to condemn a more obvious evil with a more obvious sin, two decades later, and yet the whole point of this movie is to address grievances when they happen, rather than shrink away from them, ignore them, deny them.  This is a movie about the lies we tell ourselves, about the truths we refuse to face, and how it poisons everything around us, and yes, that have devastating consequences. 

So it is not just powerful filmmaking art, but it is a powerful storytelling statement.  And when the sled is finally lost for good, tossed into an inferno, the world loses its chance to understand a man who did everything in his power to gain his revenge, having lost his ability to speak for himself, and farce becomes tragedy.  Charlie Kane continually loses himself, and we as voiceless observers alone are capable of redeeming him.  In celebrating Citizen Kane, it's important to remember that its message is what's most important about it, and that if we want a better world, we have to know what's wrong, and how to fix it.  Many people will tell you what's wrong, and like everyone trying to answer what Charlie's last words were, they're won't understand what they're talking about.  Charlie died a monster.  But he wasn't, really.  He was just another citizen, and that's all he ever wanted to be.