"Someone to Love" unloved by "Only the Cinema" film critic

[Harvey Chartrand]

Someone to Love – regrettably Orson Welles' last film, released in 1987 – is brutally panned on the Only the Cinema blogsite @ http://seul-le-cinema.blogspot.com/2009 ... -love.html
The reviewer, Ed Howard, compares director Henry Jaglom unfavorably to film auteurs Woody Allen and Eric Rohmer and to cartoonist/writer Jules Feiffer, who (like Jaglom) all dwell on themes of loneliness and "the antagonisms and insecurities and self-erected barriers that plague the relationships between men and women in the modern age." Howard writes that Jaglom's "filmmaking itself is amateurish and uneven, his cutting inept, displaying all the distracting attributes of a theater director working in film: especially, the awkward reaction shots in which people, supposedly watching something happening nearby, seem to be in an entirely different room or maybe a different building." A fellow named Joshua notes in a comment that he remembers being "incredibly annoyed by how clear it was that Orson Welles was not in the same room as any of the other cast members (Sally Kellerman, Andrea Marcovicci et al), aside from Jaglom", when shooting his scenes as the wisdom-spouting patriarch. I don't remember noticing this when I forced myself to sit through Jaglom's vapid feminist romance 22 years ago.
Strangely enough, at one point in the film, Welles actually says to Jaglom: "Why have you imposed this peculiar misery on your friends in a noble institution like the theater?" It's as if he knew his last flick was going to be a colossal bomb.
I find it utterly horrifying that the genius who reached the directors' pantheon with Citizen Kane, Falstaff, Touch of Evil and The Fountain of Youth, etc. made his swan song in this boring, self-indulgent mess. Definitely Orson's worst film as an actor, right down there with Zen Business, Tesla and The Witching.
Boris Karloff was lucky to have Peter Bogdanovich give him a good send-off with Targets. Sadly, Welles wasn't quite so fortunate in his work with Jaglom.

[Glenn Anders]

Harvey: I think if we gave Henry Jaglom truth serum (just asked him, simpler yet), he would tell us that most of his later films are attempts at, and hybrids of, the "essay film" -- which Welles limned so beautifully in F FOR FAKE. In fact, it should be no secret here that Jaglom has been taking Welles' advice to make small films, utilizing friends as a kind of poor man's Mercury Players, creating steadily, his whole career -- following as Welles did, a kind of autobiographical drift hidden in the shadows of their back stories. In many of Jaglom's films, there is either an overt or an implied reference to his mentor, Welles, his style or his work.

The awkwardness of the early essay pictures was, at least early on, part of their charm. The films of his I like most are the the early ones (before the essays): A SAFE PLACE, TRACKS, SITTING DUCKS, ALWAYS, and a later one, LAST SUMMER IN THE HAMPTONS. He is constantly paying homage to lost loves and lost teachers, the few uncompromising artists of Hollywood left after "the golden age."

SOMEONE TO LOVE combined Jaglom's lost love theme and his lost teacher theme, in that he may well have re-cut the picture as a farewell to Welles, rather than produce another lament over the failure of his marriage to Patricia Townsend.

The symbol of an old movie palace, about to torn town, works for me in regard to Welles, as does Welles' final magnificent advice a -- CUT!

Glenn

[Sir Bygber Brown]

I think "essay picture" is really being kind on "Someone to Love." Its really such an odd film that feels more akin to reality TV, or some kind of "unplanned" TV show, like one led by comedians Merrick and Rosso in Australia, that was always more awkward than liberating in tone.

To put it simply, Henry Jaglom stars and directs himself, as a 1970's filmmaker whose films have dated very badly in 2009, and who, like henry Jaglom himself, happens to be good friends with the great Orson Welles. He and Orson shoot the proverbial poop for five inutes in Orson's hotel room, about Henr'ys high-falutin ideas about this "film" he is trying to "make."

Like "Plan 9 From Outer Space" before it, "Someone to Love" seems to have been conceived as a couple of scenes (here nothing more than assisted monologues) with a dying legendt, the visibly unwell Welles, then expanded well beyond the point of good sense by inviting several of Jaglom's other friends, who share their feelings of loneliness and "Hollywood old age". The troupe then gather in a closing theatre and pontificate repeatedly for an hour, or as long as your attention lasts.

I feel like Jaglom had good intentions; and "analysing" the loneliness of himself and his friends did indeed feel like a great philanthrohic and philosophical enterprise, for as long as I was inside the film, but not also without a feeling that it was being presented in a silly and boneheaded way, the self-referential improvised dialogues coming off as very 70's and just not enough crumbs to justify a whole slice of bread. Maybe a one-hour made-for-TV slice of bread, or perhaps a brief toast soldier between more substantial meals.

Ben Cheshire (Sir Bygber)

[Glenn Anders]

Your assessment works for me, Sir Bygber Brown.

I think that LAST SUMMER IN THE HAMPTONS, one of Jaglom's less well known pictures, makes as a whole a more successful homage to to the spirit of Orson Welles. Even if Welles takes the form of Viveca Lindfors, who died shortly after the film was completed.

Glenn

[Alan Brody]

And who was Welles's Cordelia in the 1956 New York production of King Lear. I agree that Someone To Love has about an hour's worth of good stuff in it, including Welles. The bickering between Jaglom and his brother is pretty funny, and it's good to see Oja in there too.