In 1971, the notorious critic Pauline Kael published an essay in the New Yorker entitled “Raising Kane”, which examined the original shooting script of Citizen Kane and alleged that the film that had come to be popularly regarded as the greatest movie of all time, owed more to the efforts of Herman J. Mankiewicz, the scripts’ credited co-author, than Orson Welles. It caused a great controversy in the film community and though many of Kaels’ claims were debunked, it remains an important piece of film academia, and if nothing else has restored Mankiewicz’s name to the discussion surrounding that movie, long dominated by the ever-imposing figure of Welles as its sole creative auteur. And I have to wonder if David Fincher, or indeed his late father Jack, had been a fan of this essay.
Mank is definitely a film Pauline Kael would have appreciated, and I believe so would Mankiewicz himself, who bore a grudge against Welles on the credit for the film for the rest of his life. It certainly seems to paint him as the chief architect behind Citizen Kane in story if not in technical or performative brilliance; and it does so by tying hints of that film to Manks’ own relationships to his detested studio head Louis B. Mayer, as well as the great newspaper titan himself and direct model for Kane, William Randolph Hearst.
The film is directed by David Fincher, his first since 2014’s Gone Girl, from a script written by his father in the 90s. And it starkly stands apart next to the kind of films Fincher is known for. He’s never expressed a particular interest in Hollywood history as a subject, and the material of Mank is significantly less dark than Finchers’ typical output. However, the film bears other particular stylistic signatures regardless. Its’ black and white cinematography often resembles The Artist in its mimicry of an old Hollywood aesthetic, and the touch to communicate flashbacks through establishing script directions is charming. There are a lot of old techniques on display: classical opening credits title cards, scene transition wipes and fade outs, snappy dialogue between characters, and I swear a couple exterior scenes shot on a soundstage. It very much reads as a fun excuse for Fincher to make a classic Hollywood drama using all the conventions of the time to shine a spotlight on a figure and a profession that especially during that era, seemed to be often overlooked.
Gary Oldman is a real delight as the opinionated, sharp and witty Mank, a figure whose personality and intellect seems universally admired within the industry, even if he personally isn’t always liked. It’s not hard to see why Welles handpicked him for his bold new cinema project off of his distinct cleverness and rebel streak. Much like Citizen Kane, the film presents dual narratives, one of Mank scripting Kane in the seclusion of the Victorville Ranch under cover of recuperating from a car accident, and the other following his career at MGM in the early 1930s and his social relations principally with Mayer (Arliss Howard), Hearst (an always menacing Charles Dance), and Hearsts’ young wife and movie star Marion Davies (a magnetic Amanda Seyfried). A bulk of these flashbacks actually centre on the 1934 California gubernatorial election, where Manks’ ideologically socialist leanings come into conflict with the harsh Republican conservatism of his social circles -Mayer most of all. Politics are noticeably pronounced as a factor in the division between Mank and his wealthier connections, and while its’ clear Fincher is drawing a few contemporary parallels (particularly the conservative painting of socialism as a kind of broad left-wing boogeyman), it’s still a tad impressive just how recently resonant some aspects of that world are.
But that’s part of the point of the film really, to show how the same things that frustrate Mank are going on now; and how relieving it must have been to channel that vitriol into a screenplay that was an innovative, unconventional, major political risk, given the power of Hearst. Citizen Kane itself surely illustrates the apparent timelessness of some of these themes, and in its’ debt to Kane, Mank finds itself imitating various shot compositions and even a couple direct moments from the film. Hearst’s San Simeon is nowhere as barren as Kane’s Xanadu, but it is just as imposing, just as garishly excessive -something that is nowhere more apparent than at a fancy costume feast (and this movie should win that Oscar just for Seyfried’s amazing marching band get-up) where Mank unleashes a fantastic drunken spiel satirically likening Hearst and Mayer to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
Lots of figures of classic Hollywood appear here and elsewhere in the movie, some in blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameos, others in more substantial roles, including Irving Thalberg (Ferdinand Kingsley), David O. Selznick (Toby Leonard Moore), Charles Lederer (Joseph Cross), and Ben Hecht (Jeff Harms). The most significant of these is future two time consecutive Oscar winner Joseph Mankiewicz (Tom Pelphrey), Manks’ younger brother and often his conscience. Welles himself doesn’t appear in the movie much, though his shadow looms large over much of the Victorville sequences, occasionally given life by a stunning Tom Burke. Lily Collins and Tuppence Middleton are in the film too, as Manks’ caretaker and his wife respectively, but it is Oldman who carries the movie, aided often by Seyfried in one of her most exuberant performances.
For both a person and a plot defined by their relationship to Citizen Kane, I was surprised how little this film dealt with that actual movie, culminating in Mank fighting for his credit on the screenplay, declaring it the best thing he’d ever written. And yet this is of course appropriate, given an actual making-of movie would wind up far more about Welles than Finchers’ chosen subject. So instead Mank opts to focus its lens on that intersection of Hollywood and politics in the 1930s, and how these circumstances and Mank’s own experiences in the company of the obscenely wealthy and privileged informed the context of that immortal classic –while also drawing a picture of perhaps one of the most interesting behind-the-scenes figures in the industry. At the very least it works to recast Mank as more than just a disgruntled writer with a grudge for being kicked out of Hearsts’ inner circle. It reminds me of another movie about a politically outspoken classic Hollywood screenwriter, Trumbo –though this is unequivocally the superior article.
The power of Manks’ work speaks for itself. Some may dispute this film for arguably giving him too much credit –Welles’ number one fanboy Peter Bogdanovich is sure to take issue. But there’s an honesty to even the exaggeration in this work. Rubbing shoulders with men like Hearst and Mayer, and those who would enable them, seeing their character and beliefs up close, who wouldn’t be driven to write a cinema-defining masterpiece?!
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