Why Citizen Kane Isn't Even Orson Welles' Best Film

Citizen Kane continues to sit atop the lists of greatest movies ever made when that list is compiled by critics and/or filmmakers. When the list is created by moviegoers, not so much. While I admire Orson Welles' debut masterpiece, not only do I disagree with its ultimate positioning atop these lists, but I would argue that it is not even Welles' best-or even second best-film. For such a well-regarded cinematic achievement, Citizen Kane can prove at times curiously uninvolving. In many ways the movie is kind of like a strikingly pretty girl who is not dumb, but instead strikingly intelligent; even so, you never hear her described as smart woman before a you hear her described as a pretty woman. Citizen Kane is like that; it's gorgeous to look at, but its surface succeeds in trumping its deeper qualities.

Uninvolving is the key problem, I think, that most moviegoers of the past thirty or forty years have had with Citizen Kane. No, correct that. Uninvolving is the second biggest problem; the first problem is that so much of what made Citizen Kane such a revolutionary film is now old hat. Today's filmmakers see movies with deep focus and overlapping dialogue and even, sometimes, amazingly complex but subtly realized optical effects as standard cinematic language. While Citizen Kane was hardly the first film, or even the first Hollywood film, to utilize these techniques, it was the first film to use them to perfection and to integrate the style into the thematic centerpiece of the story. What was almost avant-garde at the time is the mainstream today and so that gorgeous pretty woman façade of Citizen Kane is now as plain as Halle Berry. And without that flirtation to draw today's audiences in, there is simply no way to get them involved in the story of Charles Foster Kane.