Thirty-three years after his death and nearly fifty years after the beginning of the project, Orson Welles' The Other Side of the Wind, the director's long anticipated final movie, has finally arrived! This review of the movie is best
read in conjunction with my review of the documentary They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead,
which was released simultaneously with The Other Side of the Wind and tells its backstory: Welles’ struggle and ultimate failure to
get this magnum opus completed during his lifetime. Here is a link.
Welles intended The Other Side of the Wind to be a
kind of bookend to his career – a final epic that might counterbalance the
weighty legacy of his first acclaimed feature, Citizen Kane. Like Kane, it is, among other things an appraisal of
a man’s life through the prism of his death. This is not a light entertainment,
although it certainly has a sense of humor. But it’s not nearly so polished as
the earlier masterpiece. It feels like a jumble at times and like an
inspiration at others. It is very much a picture of its time – the early 1970s
– which sometimes makes one cringe a bit – at a few jokes that by current
standards are inappropriate or politically incorrect for example. The targets
of Welles’ satire – the hollowness of many of the era’s experimental, arty
films for example - sometimes seem dated; yet at the same time, the movie’s
barbs are often surprisingly contemporary and universal – one example being the
evisceration of privacy that is the price of celebrity. The cinematography,
principally by Gary Graves, is often startlingly beautiful – particularly in
the otherwise intentionally pretentious film within the film.
With the aim of shaking out some financial backing for
his project, an old friend, Zarah Valeska (Lilli Palmer) has arranged a big
birthday party for Jake, to which she has invited all sorts of movie-biz folks:
old friends, money people, youthful directors from Hollywood’s new guard of the
early seventies (which is when the movie is set, i.e. contemporary with when it
was conceived and shot), and various celebrities and beautiful people of the
day. Hannaford’s unfinished film is shown at the party; and so, interspersed
with the “real” goings on, we get a movie within the movie – also called “The
Other Side of the Wind”. The movie within the movie is broadly patterned after,
and intended to satirize, the recent spate of new wave art-house pomposities,
such as Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point – beautiful but incoherent filmmaking in search of a story. The party scene, on the other hand is shot documentary style, with lots of cuts and jumps, seemingly from a multitude of cameramen.
The Other Side of the Wind is introduced with a voiceover
narrative spoken by Peter Bogdanovich, who introduces himself as the character
he plays in the film: “My name is Brooks Otterlake, probably Hannaford’s most
successful acolyte.” He explains that what
we are about to see is a retrospective about the catastrophe of Hannaford’s
uncompleted last movie as revealed by the events at his 70th birthday
party. The film was put together, he says, from numerous sources: from the
documentary filmmakers invited at the time to film the event to footage from
several of the young directors invited to the party who just happened to bring
along their 16mm cameras. This was long
before the advent of cellphones, digital video or social media, “Otterlake”
explains. He adds that we’ll also see footage from what turned out to be Jake’s
last project, the film that was to be called The Other Side of the Wind, left
just as it was “on what turned out to be the last day of his life.”
I’ve seen Welles’ movie twice so far, once at the 2018 Telluride
Film Festival, and again, more recently, streaming from Netflix. The first time was the North American premier
of the movie on September 1, 2018. Going
in without much of an idea about the style of the picture or what it was about,
I was mesmerized, dazzled, confused, intrigued and by the end, uncertain what
to make of it all. It seemed like a
jumble, but a fascinating one.
The fellow sitting next to me, a “name” movie critic for a
national publication, fell asleep part way through, but perhaps he was simply
overworked as a journalist at a film festival. When the screening was over, the
excited buzz among the 650 other cinephiles in attendance seemed generally in
accord with my reaction: undecided but also thrilled.
Since then, most critics have rallied to The
Other Side of the Wind. It has a quite favorable Metacritic score of
80. Larry Kikta wrote in Film Threat: "It’s a parody, a biopic, a comedy, an experimental film, and God knows what
else. It may sound crazy to say, but The Other Side of the Wind is quite
possibly Orson Welles most ambitious picture and that might explain why it
remained unfinished for so long.” And Sam Adams in Slate describes the film thusly “a mess about messes, pretension
about pretension, an exhausted movie about artistic exhaustion. And eerily,
it’s a movie about a director who dies too soon and is survived by his own
unfinished work. Whether it’s great is almost beside the point. That it exists
is astonishment enough.” Finally, here’s Chris Nashawaty’s recent take in Entertainment Weekly: “The
Other Side of the Wind (both the movie and the movie within a movie) is
a hypnotic, magical mess of a film. It’s a lot of story and not enough of one.
Still, there are shots that are so haunting and beautifully composed that you
want to get out of your seat and take up residence in them.”
It is definitely a film for Welles’ fans and film buffs
generally. Also, I’d say for those who enjoy a movie one can chew on. There’s a lot of meat on this bone. Since it’s a Netflix film, one has the option of watching more than once which, in my case at least was quite rewarding.
The Other Side of the Wind features a number of fine
performances, too many to mention them all. First and foremost, though, is John
Huston as Jake Hannaford, the legendary, mysterious, charming, devilish great
man director who may or may not be a Welles stand-in. He’s not a particularly
good guy, but he can be counted on to deliver oracular quips on cue, he acts like
the tough old man’s man he wants you to believe he is, and he commands every room
and every scene he is in. By the end, as his world is closing in on him, I
found myself, against my better judgment, sympathizing with rough old Jake.
Bogdanovich too is quite good and credible as Otterlake, the
Hannaford disciple whose rise to success has paralleled Hannaford’s tumble from
grace, and who is struggling to balance loyalty to his mentor with his own
self-interest. Another standout is Norman Foster as Billy Boyle, a loyal, if
not always effective aide and companion to Jake, and Paul Stewart as his
personal assistant. And lovely Susan Strasberg is very effective as a cinema
critic, Julie Rich (supposedly modeled after Pauline Kael), who asks a lot of
questions but isn’t getting a lot of answers. She doesn’t hesitate to puncture
the balloon of macho posturing of Jake and his cohort, theorizing perhaps
correctly that homo-eroticism may be behind this veneer.
The Other Side of the Wind is a movie well worth seeing. It may even be great. I probably will have to watch it again. If this review has piqued your interest, by all means you should see it. Heck, it’s on Netflix!
122 minutes
(Not rated, but features a fair amount of nudity and some cussing.)
Grade A-
Exclusively streaming
on Netflix.
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