[9.0/10] There’s a scene toward the end of *Citizen Kane* where the title character walks down one of his hollow palace’s many gaping hallways. As he does, scores of reflections of the man cascade into infinity on either side of him, the product of two mirrors dividing the various shades of the man beyond measure.

Maybe it’s just a cool shot. Orson Welles packs plenty of those into the film. Plenty of ink, digital and old fashioned, has been spilled on the revolutionary techniques and advancements the famed director brought to cinematic storytelling with *Citizen Kane*. But what’s impressive is how well those visuals hold up eight decades later.

Fades from one image to the next that could seem kitschy in other hands carry gravitas and the weight of years. His camera is almost always moving, with slow pans across massive spaces to communicate the cavernous confines. He’ll zoom in on the right expression, centering the intensity of a given moment or allow his actors (chiefly himself) to sell the emotion of a scene, or pull back to reveal a perfectly choreographed hum of activity, the whirr of his well-oiled, well-funded machines when they were still in sync.

Even in more basic sequences, he blocks and frames his performers and sumptuous sets so well that you could practically freeze the picture at any given moment and still comprehend the feeling of a scene. Much of that’s owed to the expert use of lighting here, where some characters are bathed in brightness, others are hidden in the shadows, and still more slowly make their way from one to the other, signifying the moral and personal descent at play in this character story.

In short, for a film made so long ago, it looks and feels remarkably modern. Scads of older movies, some long post-dating *Citizen Kane* scan like celluloid stage plays, static and simple in their visual composition. But Welles’s 1941 opus moves so nimbly, makes meaning from its visuals so adeptly, paints each frame so well, that its lasting influence becomes apparent on aesthetics alone. With texture this good, Welles could be forgiven for setting up Kane’s hall of mirrors as simply another striking image in a movie not short on them.

But I’d like to think there’s more to it. I’d like to think that this image, of Charles Foster Kane in one of his lowest moments, is a symbol of all the people he was and might have been, in contrast to the sad old man he became. So much of *Citizen Kane* is about its title character’s rise and fall amid the country that provided for it. But it’s also about chance, the small unplannable moments -- an unexpected gold mine, a random meeting with a woman who laughs at you, a quotation mark in a headline -- that end up directing the lives of even the grand figures of the ages.

It’s old hat now to note that Welles’s classic charts the ascent and decline of its protagonist, from an idealistic, disrupting dervish of new money surrounded by friends and hangers-on, to an hollowed out husk of a person, flanked only by his meaningless mountains of possessions and all that empty space. But what’s striking, even now, is the levers that Welles and company pull to illustrate that decline, the ideals Kane abandons on his steady slide into lonely obsolescence.
The linchpin is, as the film slowly reveals, his lost childhood, but that manifests in a bevy of interesting ways. Most notably, it comes through in how Kane positions himself as a man working on behalf of those who share his working class background. But as the film wears on, his purposes become more and more self-centered, until his own best friend challenges his people’s crusades as one big vanity masquerade, an act of condescension and theater from a man who’s more apt to revel in his luxury and play for admiration than genuinely put his money to work for the good of the common folks.

It comes through in his faltering commitment to the truth and his ideals, making grand declarations of purpose and aiming to challenge power, only to direct his media empire in support of his pet projects to try to bend reality to his whims and needs. In the process of his descent, he alienates everyone sorry enough to grow close to him.

His wife and son are betrayed (and implicitly felled) by his infidelity and his inability to give up his ambitions to protect their well-being. His oldest friend turns his back on him having truly seen who his erstwhile running buddy has become in self-serving opulence. The second wife he marries and forces into the mold of opera star purely so as not to have to admit defeat finally departs as well, alienated by his growing detachment from anything beyond his own immediate orbit. *Citizen Kane* traces the streams and estuaries that emerged and converged to bring its subject to this sorry culmination and realization of what’s wanting in all of it.

Early in the film, Kane tells his adoptive caretaker that had he not been raised amid such luxury, he might genuinely become a good man. It’s hard to know whether or not he’s right on that count. Maybe the money slowly but surely corrupted him. Maybe the absence of a mother who loved so much that she did what she thought was best for him, at great personal hardship, staunched his ability to give and receive that sort of love himself. Maybe living under the implied abuse of his biological father would have messed him up in ways less glamorous but no less inevitable.

Maybe he would have lived an ordinary, at times difficult, but ultimately happier life had he stayed in Colorado or never met his mistress or finally found enough to satisfy that gaping hole within him that constantly demanded more. Maybe that mix of nature and nurture and pure chance simply creates an unpredictable cocktail of a person depending on how it all shakes out.

That’s the lasting takeaway from *Citizen Kane* that rings true eighty years later. We still contain multitudes, as Charles Foster Kane did, suffused with possibilities lost, realized, and imagined. Whether in 1941 or the present day, human beings are still rife with boundless potential and just as many contradictions.

A man who claims to be only for the people can steadily lose touch with them. A man who only wants love can have no idea how to truly give it to others and receive it in return. A man who carries one of the best-recognized names and personas in the land can leave this world without ever truly being known. And the man who has everything can look back at his life, at the many versions of himself he might have been, and realizes he’s missing the one thing he truly wants.