Neither Williams nor Kenneth Branagh, who plays Olivier, looks quite like their model, and their problems are exacerbated by the fact that they not only impersonate film stars but also perform very precise reenactments of scenes from The Prince and the Showgirl. Williams overcomes potential reservations by virtue of her luminous beauty and exemplary rendition of Marilyn’s patented little-girl voice. Her performance of one of Marilyn’s singing and dancing numbers, which uses the same costuming and camera angle as the original movie, looks almost as if a double exposure of her and Marilyn would perfectly match. At the more subtle and realistic level, Williams gives complexity to the character, suggesting Marilyn’s insecurity and guile, curiosity and intelligence, and mixture of fear and pleasure over the power of her stardom. The film also gives her a chance to reveal that Marilyn’s show-business image was the product of imitation: at one point, faced with a group of admirers, she asks her companion, “Shall I be her?” and breaks into an openmouthed display of voluptuousness. For his part, Branagh gives an amusing impersonation of the actor who has often been regarded as his predecessor. He’s especially good at capturing Olivier’s theatrical and narcissistic eccentricities: the tendency to raise his hand to his brow like a gentleman lifting a teacup; the rising, singsong inflection of his voice; the melancholic postures and sudden gusts of witchy, almost girlish business. He even accurately reproduces the comic “Carpathian” accent Olivier used in The Prince and the Showgirl.
One phenomenon peculiar to celebrity impersonation in the biopic is that, because of the realist nature of the genre, it always takes a few scenes for the audience to accept the mimicry and settle into a willing suspension of disbelief. This is especially true when an established movie star performs the impersonation. Near the beginning of Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra (2013), for example, Michael Douglas performs a reenactment of Liberace’s Las Vegas nightclub act, and throughout the scene I feel a kind of amused wonder, thinking to myself, “It’s Michael Douglas!” The thought never goes away but it gradually becomes less intrusive, in part because the film moves from a huge public spectacle to increasingly intimate scenes, and in part because, as the story develops, Douglas gives a good deal of complexity to the character.
When a relatively unknown actor performs an impersonation, the effect of the split between actor and role is slightly different because the audience doesn’t know the actor’s normal “self.” An impressive instance is Christian McKay as Orson Welles in Richard Linklater’s textual biopic Me and Orson Welles (2009). This film imagines a single week in New York in 1937, when, through a combination of boyish self-confidence and amazing good luck, an entirely fictional teenage acting hopeful played by Zac Efron finds himself swept up into the whirlwind staging of Welles’s modern-dress Julius Caesar. The reenactment of events surrounding the rehearsal and staging of the play is flawed, giving virtually no sense of the politics of the Mercury Theater and too little evidence of why Caesar made such a powerful impression on those who saw it. And, when we witness snippets of the show on opening night, they lack the disturbing patterns of light and darkness and aura of violence that stunned the original audience. Instead, everything is subordinated to a comic portrayal of behind-the-scenes sexual shenanigans and to demonstrations of Welles’s supposed will to power.
Like most movies about Welles, Me and Orson Welles seems to take more relish in depicting his character flaws (at least one of which, womanizing, he no doubt possessed) than in his artistic accomplishments. In this case we’re shown a quarrel between technician Samuel Leve, who wants credit on the show’s playbill, and Welles, who thunderously declares that Julius Caesar is “my vision.” (Where this quarrel is concerned, I recommend that readers consult producer John Houseman’s Run-Through: A Memoir, pages 296–98, where we’re told that Leve’s job, under the direction of Jean Rosenthal, was simply to convert Welles’s design sketches into blueprints.) The film nevertheless gives a fine sense of how a romantic, idealistic theater company on the verge of great things can become an ambitious young man’s family of choice, albeit a family with as many rivalries and disillusionments as any other. As its title indicates, it depicts not just Welles but nearly everyone in the Mercury Theater as amusingly self-preoccupied; even Efron, the star of Walt Disney’s High School Musical franchise and the heartthrob of millions of teenage girls, cleverly reveals the calculation lurking behind innocence. Chief among the virtues of the film, however, is McKay. Welles has been played by many actors, including Paul Shenar, Eric Purcell, Jean Guérin, Vincent D’Onofrio (aided by the voice of Maurice LaMarche), Liev Schreiber, and Angus Macfadyen—but none have come this close to his looks, voice, and slightest movements. In contrast, the actors around McKay do little to imitate the real-life figures they represent: James Tupper looks a bit like Joseph Cotten, but Eddie Marsan, Leo Bill, and Ben Chaplin have no resemblance at all to John Houseman, Norman Lloyd, and George Coulouris. Almost the entire responsibility of creating a persuasive historical representation falls on McKay, who, before appearing in the film, had performed successfully in a one-man stage show about Welles and apparently come to know his model intimately. He captures the booming voice, the vaguely mid-Atlantic accent, the twinkle in the eye, the forbidding glance, and the heavy yet somehow buoyant walk. He’s slightly too old (Welles was twenty-two at the time of Caesar) and never displays Welles’s infectious laugh, but he merges with the character more completely than a star could have done and is just as convincing when he tries to seduce a young woman as when he proclaims ideas about theater. To hear him read aloud a passage from Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons is to feel as if one were in the presence of Welles. Even so, the actor McKay is always present to us alongside the impersonation, taking obvious pleasure in the magic trick he performs, enabling us to see that Welles was not simply a flamboyant personality but an actor and director of seriousness and importance who could bring audiences to their feet.
Whenever we encounter an overt, creative impersonation such as the ones performed by Michelle Williams, Kenneth Branagh, Michael Douglas, and Christian McKay in the films I’ve mentioned, we can easily appreciate the singular skill of the performers. But imitation in all its manifestations has always been an important, even crucial, feature of the art of movie acting. The various forms of imitation discussed here—the copying of conventional gestures and accents, the rote repetition of predetermined gestures and movements, the development of model character types, the repeated performance of personal eccentricities, and the impersonation of historical characters—may not be the most valued aspect of what actors do, but they are sources of pleasure for the audience. They contribute to the system of genres and styles (as in the distinction between comedy and drama or between conventional movie realism and a director like Bresson), and more generally to the rhetoric of characterization and the formation of personality on the screen. In a more subtle and general sense, they complicate our ideas of personal autonomy and individuality; they make us at least potentially aware of the imitative aspects of our lives in the real world, as both personalities and social beings.
The Death and Rebirth of Rhetoric
We make out of the quarrel with others rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, Per Amica Silentia Lunae, 1917
Most commentaries on film and rhetoric are indebted to the neo-Aristotelian school of literary criticism once practiced at the University of Chicago, and particularly to Wayne Booth’s highly influential The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), which is less preoccupied with overt argument or eloquence than with problems of ethical clarity and “the art of communicating” (i). Again and again, Booth emphasizes the artist’s effort, through techniques of narration and characterization, to help readers grasp the full implications of the work and to impose a fictional or illusory world upon an audience. In a similar though more overtly ideological fashion, writing on the rhetoric of film has tended to deal with issues of point of view, focalization, and enunciation, and especially with debates over what Avrom Fleishman describes as the “narrator-effect” of fiction cinema. (Besides Fleishman’s Narrated Films: Storytelling Situations in Cinema History, see Nick Browne, The Rhetoric of Filmic Narration; Seymour Chatman, Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film; Sarah Kozloff, Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film; and George M. Wilson, Narration in Light: Studies of Cinematic Point of View.)
Granting