Review: They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead (2018)
★★★★
“They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead” is a surprisingly impassioned, meticulously researched, and artfully crafted portrayal of perhaps the biggest victim of one’s own success in history; someone whose entire career was always in the shadows of his original, shadowy masterpiece; an artist who spent most of his life chasing the glory of his very first artwork which was forever deemed by everyone else and without his say the very greatest in the medium. How can you ever top that?
Welles was the quintessential auteur, unwilling to ever sacrifice his artistic vision (let alone make a whole film just for a studio to earn the freedom to realize his own vision later), repeatedly marginalized by studios until he came an utter loner rejected by the entire Hollywood establishment. This documentary chronicles what would’ve been his last movie, a postmodern meta-narrative many decades beyond its time containing two parallel sub-movies that would’ve combined to be a scathing critique of the movie business and a personal confessional about dreams deferred and aspirations unfulfilled, but for which he steadfastly refused the obvious autobiographical features, and which would’ve bookended his career with another, more famous, film about the rise and fall of someone larger than life.
Ironically, and probably to the great would-be annoyance of this documentary’s deceased subject, all the original footage and interviews here are presented 100% in the shadows of the movie whose reputation Welles spent his life trying, and failing, to transcend. The narrator is always seen in very noirish light, with lots of stark contrast and mirrors. And the interviews with actors from Welles incomplete last movie are all shot from completely jarring angles. So “The’ll Love Me When I’m Dead” is perhaps strangely guilty of the very tendency it decries of reducing an artist to a single one of their works.
Nonetheless, this documentary is unusually artistic in its approach to biography. The narrator is often placed in a screen within a screen next to a screen within in a screen that displays clips of Welles. It’s as if life itself were merely a series of movie clips. There is also lovely sequence of wide shots depicting Welles sitting on a bench calmly enjoying the scenery as the seasons slowly pass by. Some of the old footage here is just astoundingly delightful and moving, particularly what is apparently the very last footage of Welles ever taken, in which he is just heartily laughing and enjoying every ounce of a life for which he was entirely too large.
