‘They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead’
Morgan Neville’s worthy documentary on Orson Welles’ final years lets you decide.
Morgan Neville, director of this year’s affecting Mr. Rogers doc, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?,” has already found another worthy, if very different, subject in the equally penetrating “They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead.”
Focusing on the last 15 years in the life of mercurial actor-director Orson Welles, the bulk of which was spent trying to complete his passion project, “The Other Side of the Wind,” the impeccably assembled production employs Neville’s virtuoso touch to provocative effect.
Welles returned to the U.S. in 1970 after years in Europe, and his maverick sensibilities seemed to be perfectly keyed to a period when the studio system was being supplanted by a bunch of young guys with beards.
With a thinly veiled concept satirizing Hollywood’s filmmaking avant-garde but lacking a script — Welles would often say that “the greatest things in movies are divine accidents” — he corralled an oddball cast including girlfriend Oja Kodar, director John Huston, impressionist Rich Little (later replaced by Peter Bogdanovich) and Susan Strasberg in a savage send-up of critic Pauline Kael.
Just as a consortium of filmmakers sorted through fragments of material to complete the film 33 years after Welles’ 1985 death (the finished product debuts on Netflix this weekend), Neville has masterfully cobbled together a treasure trove of on-set footage, TV and festival interview clips re-creating a vivid time and place.
Time will tell if “Wind” is seen as a “divine accident” or Welles’ folly; in the interim, Neville finds Welles inhabiting a richly upholstered, not altogether rare space nestled somewhere between genius and madness.