Mank: A workmanlike retelling of Citizen Kane's apocryphal man-behind-the-masterpiece myth
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B+
American movies from the classic Hollywood period – from the 1920s to the 1950s - continue to inspire endless fascination and debate, about the relationship between individual and collaborative work, whether art happened despite or because of the factory system.
Gary Oldman is the tormented Citizen Kane writer Herman J. Mankiewicz in Mank.
Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood, takes place in the aftermath of that era. Ryan Murphy’s mini-series, Hollywood, reimagined it as more socially enlightened than the reality.
Now comes Mank by David Fincher, a fastidious technical and commercially successful filmmaker, who specializes in tales of chilly transgression (The Social Network, Zodiac, Fight Club). This is Fincher’s first movie since 2014’s Gone Girl and he’s taking on the high watermark of classic Hollywood filmmaking, Orson Welles’ 1941 Citizen Kane, considered by many the greatest movie ever made.
As suggested by the title Mank, the nickname of screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, this is not, for a change, a film about Orson Welles. The story follows a period in 1940 when the 43-year-old Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman), a legendary New York journalist, playwright, wit, gambler and self-destructive alcoholic, was holed up at a ranch house in Viktorville, California, with a broken leg, attended by a nurse and a secretary, Rita Alexander (Lily Collins).
Mank, as he’s known, has sixty days to finish the screenplay for the Hollywood debut of the 24-year-old “Boy Wonder” Welles (Tom Burke), with producer John Houseman (Sam Troughton) assigned to keep him sober and at work.
PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN
Mank, which opens in Canadian theatres on Nov. 20 (where lockdowns don’t apply) and wide on Netflix on Dec. 4, will be a must-see for film history buffs. Shot in black-and-white, it nods to Hollywood tradition without direct imitation: Cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt, Fincher’s collaborator on Gone Girl and the TV series Mindhunter, echoes the deep focus of Citizen Kane’s cinematography and occasionally quotes a shot, but softens the blacks and greys, and frames the film in modern wide-screen.
There’ a virtual thrill to visit a legendary writers’ room and listening to snippets of banter from the likes of George S. Kaufman (Adam Shapiro), SJ Perelman (Jack Romano), Ben Hecht (Jeff Harms). Or holding audiences with producers Irving Thalberg (Ferdinand Kingsley) and Louis B Meyer (Arliss Howard), or taking walk-and-talk scenes through studio backlots with costumed extras, visiting swanky dinner parties and smoke-filled nightclubs with lamps on the table.
Production designer Donald Graham Burt’s work is impeccable, whether creating a studio backlot or William Randolph Hearst’s castle in San Simeon. And the symphonic score by longtime Fincher collaborators Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, strikes all the right period notes.
By making a film about a masterpiece, Fincher is inviting lofty comparisons, and Mank doesn’t really measure up. The script, which was written by Fincher’s father, Jack Fincher (who died in 2003) is a simulation of a Citizen Kane model: John Houseman, while reading a first draft of Mank’s script, calls it a “hodgepodge of talky episodes. It's a collection of fragments that leap around in time, like Mexican jumping beans."
That’s not entirely fair to Kane’s ground-breaking flashback structure, which is held together by the investigation and interviews of reporter Jeremy Thompson (William Alland).
In contrast, Mank slips in and out of time like a drunk dream. While individual sequences are gorgeously crafted, there’s a lack of momentum and emotional connection.
What dramatic tension there is involves the pressure of Welles’ deadline and the dangerous subject matter of the film, it being a thinly disguised biography of newspaper tycoon, William Random Hearst (Charles Dance). “I hear you're hunting dangerous game," Mank's brother Joe (Tom Pelphrey) warns him.
Instead of the mystery of why the dying Charles Foster Kane whispers “Rosebud,” we get the mystery of why Mankiewicz risked drawing the ire of such a powerful enemy as Hearst. The answer, provided here, is an allegory about the tortured artist caught in the machine of money and power and politics.
In the Fincher version, Mank, came to develop a particular hatred of Hearst for political reasons, and for his own self-loathing complicity.
Along with MGM studio head Louis B Mayer, Hearst had worked to destroy the gubernatorial campaign of socialist writer Upton Sinclair. As the story goes, Mankiewicz inadvertently gave them the idea of making news reels, using actors pretending to be regular folk supporting Sinclair’s rival. In the film, one of Mank’s friends, who’d directed some of these fake news reels, later takes his life in shame.
Mank is not, ultimately, a movie to embrace or believe but to study with a certain uneasy fascination. Oldman’s performance as the acerbic, frequently soused writer is, as expected, layered with heroic self-loathing, and enough quips to remind us of Mank’s reputation as a legendary wit. He gets his big soliloquy, when he shows up drunk at a Hearst costume party, commandeers attention with an insulting pitch for a modern-day Don Quixote, starring Hearst as Quixote and Mayer as Sancho Panza, which he concludes by vomiting on his host’s floor.
There’s a less strident, but captivating performance in the film from Amanda Seyfried, as Hearst’s mistress, the sassy and free-spirited former showgirl, Marion Davies, and their scenes together give the movie its warmest moments.
Read our interview with Mank star Amanda Seyfried
Though Mankiewicz is married (his long-suffering wife, played by Tuppence Middleton, bears the ignominious nickname “poor Sara”) he and mistress Marion share an interest in drinking and saying what they’re not supposed to. That includes worrying about Nazis when Louis B Mayer is dismissing troubling developments in Europe with a flippant, “Hitler schmitler!”
The two outsiders platonically bond. There’s a magical scene where they split from a dinner party together and wander around at night among San Simeon’s exotic animal enclosures, like a couple of little kids on an escapade.
Hollywood is no place to go for scrupulous historical accuracy and Mank is no exception. There’s no evidence, for example, that Mankiewicz had any special loyalty to Upton Sinclair or was involved in creating those fake news reels.
And in making Mankiewicz the principal architect of Citizen Kane, the film also relegates an eighty-year-old dispute about Citizen Kane’s authorship that has essentially been settled. The anti-Welles line, promoted by Pauline Kael in The New Yorker in 1971, was that Citizen Kane was Mankiewicz’s masterpiece and Welles was an aggressive opportunist.
This has been effectively refuted, notably in Robert L Carringer’s 1978 essay, The Scripts of Citizen Kane, who concluded that Welles transformed Mankiewicz’s script “from a solid basis for a story into an authentic plan for a masterpiece.”
Appropriately, Mank falls more into the “solid basis for a story” category.
Mank. Directed by David Fincher. Written by Jack Fincher. Starring: Gary Oldman, Amanday Seyfriend, Lily Collins, Arliss Howard, Tom Pelphrey, Sam Torughton, Tuppence Middleton, Tom Burke, Charles Dance. Mank opens on Nov. 20 in Ottawa, Waterloo, London, Windsor, Sudbury, Regina, Saskatoon, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver, and is available on Dec. 4 on Netflix.