OnScreen Review: "Mank"
Ken Jones, Chief Film Critic
Tales about Old Hollywood and the inner workings of the movie industry are something of a regular occurrence in movies, especially in the class of Oscar contenders. Just in the last decade, films like The Artist, Trumbo, Judy, Hail, Caesar!, and even Once Upon a Time in Hollywood are just a few of the titles that are either biographical or fictional looks back at stories in the old studio system. David Fincher’s latest, Mank, continues that tradition. Films about filmmaking are not just a recent trend; Billy Wilder’s classic from 1950, Sunset Boulevard, can be routinely found in the Top 20 of any list of the greatest films of all time. There has always been a curiosity, sometimes even a morbid curiosity, about how the sausage gets made.
Citizen Kane is a film that surpasses even Sunset Boulevard in stature. Widely considered one of the greatest films ever made, Citizen Kane announced the arrival of Orson Welles as a multi-hyphenate genius in Hollywood at only 24. Many people know the story of Orson Welles; fewer people, myself included, know the story of the man who wrote the screenplay for Citizen Kane, Herman Mankiewicz. The creation of the screenplay is the subject of Mank. I never knew that the authorship of the screenplay was so contentious, or that so much ink has been spilled over it over so many decades.
Mank is a movie that can be about several things: Old Hollywood; driven and destructive personalities; the politics of the 1930s reflecting the current political climate; an ode and a tweak of classic films; one of the premiere auteurs of his generation (Fincher) making the case for a more egalitarian view of filmmaking; and a son paying tribute to his father (Fincher’s late father Jack wrote the screenplay over 20 years ago and passed away in 2003).
The film is definitely about Herman Mankiewicz, though, portrayed by Gary Oldman. Oldman is an actor who is known for being a chameleon on screen, able to disappear into characters like few can. He won the Oscar for portraying Winston Churchill, but he has portrayed characters as varied as Lee Harvey Oswald, Dracula, Commissioner Gordon, Sirius Black, and Zorg. It is funny, then, that he is stripped down to giving a straightforward, “gimmick-free” performance in a movie that is a faithful recreation of a classic Hollywood film from the period in which it is set. The movie is shot in black and white, features a prodigious amount of cigarette burns, and has the fade to black scene transitions that so many films from that time are known for; even scenes at night are shot during the day in the way that they were done back then.
Mank writes the script in 1940 while recuperating in a bed after having his leg broken in a car accident. He is aided mainly by two assistants, his secretary Rita (Lily Collins) and his housekeeper Fraulein Frieda (Monika Grossmann). The film jumps back and forth between the writing process and Mank’s travails in the Hollywood studios during the 1930s, mainly under MGM and the eye of studio head Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard). During this time Mank also develops a friendship with William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance) and his mistress Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried). The friendship between Mank and Davies is one of the crucial elements of the film, and a tragic one since the story for Citizen Kane draws heavily from the biography of Hearst.
Over the course of the film, we witness the increasing disdain Mank has for Mayer and Hearst, as well as studio executive Irving Thalberg (Ferdinand Kingsley), who presses hard against the gubernatorial campaign of Upton Sinclair (portrayed in a small role by none other than Bill Nye the Science Guy!). Conversations at dinner parties about the difference between communism and socialism feel especially relevant in the aftermath of the 2020 US presidential election. Those parties also show an increasingly drunk and verbally combative Mank, who cannot be reined in by his wife Sara (Tuppance Middleton), despite her best efforts to remind him to play nice. In fact, the scene where the genesis of what would become Citizen Kane occurs at a party and is one of the highlights of the film. The drinking and the verbal barbs lead Mank down the inevitable path of self-destruction, and to a place where writing an uncredited treatment for Citizen Kane is a chance to turn things around or at least steer out of the skid.
In a career full of memorable performances, Oldman’s performance as Mank is one of his finest. He is as unadorned as you are ever apt to see Gary Oldman in a role and his talent as an actor shines. He delivers some delectable lines of dialogue that would be the envy of quite a few screenwriters. Oldman is sure to garner some award consideration, as is Seyfried. It is also a remarkable change of pace from Fincher; much more of a studio crowd-pleaser than he is known to make. It is his most “conventional” film and may be the one to finally nab him an Oscar in a more barren year.
There is likely quite a bit of liberty taken in the interpretation of events involved in the creation of Citizen Kane by Fincher and company here. But we do not necessarily go to the movies (or, in this day and age, watch them streaming on our couches) for history lessons. Much like Zodiac, also based on real life events, Fincher is not chasing the facts of the case to draw a definitive answer for his viewers. What he is going for is what Mank himself describes when trying to explain the nonlinear structure of his script. “The narrative is one big circle, like a cinnamon roll, not a straight line pointing to the nearest exit. You cannot capture a man’s entire life in two hours. All you can hope is to leave the impression of one.” This is a perfect encapsulation of Mank and any of the discussion it reignites about Citizen Kane.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
(Mank is streaming on Netflix)