David Fincher’s Mank (USA, 2020) is, to my mind, a thoughtfully entertaining, gorgeous, well-acted and extraordinarily well-written film. But I think it’s going to be quite a slog for those who aren’t dyed-in-the-wool film history geeks, or those who value a compelling narrative through-line over thickly-dispensed style and technical gimmickry.
“Mank” is screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman, superb), whose place in film history, while debated, is nonetheless secured by his participation in writing the screenplay for Citizen Kane, Orson Welles’ 1941 feature film debut – and a fictionalized but thinly-veiled critical biography of William Randolph Hearst – that regularly hits the top three of Greatest-Film-Ever lists. In a 1971 New Yorker magazine article, the film critic Pauline Kael made the argument that the notoriously self-promoting Welles didn’t contribute nearly as much as one might think to the Oscar-winning script he acted in and directed, and that Herman Mankiewicz deserved sole credit, rather than shared, based on his own experience as an acquaintance of William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance), the powerful publisher and political player, and his partner at the time, the actress Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried). (Kael’s version of events has since been aggressively denounced by, among others, director / historian Peter Bogdanovich and New Yorker film critic Richard Brody). Hearst financed hundreds of silent short subject and documentary films from 1914 on, as well as financing many of Marion Davies’ projects. Davies was already an established film comedienne, but Hearst wanted her to do more serious, classical roles as well. He also had a close relationship with Louis B. Mayer (“L.B.”) (Arliss Howard) – Hearst provided financing for many MGM pictures and promoted them through reviews in Hearst newspapers. A staunch Republican, Mayer shared many of Hearst’s xenophobic views and anti-socialist proclivities.
Starting out as a theater critic and playwright in New York, Mankiewicz had been a very successful screenwriter through the 1920’s and 30s, working primarily for Paramount Pictures (though he did some MGM work, too) writing rich and efficient intertitles for silent movies, then screenplays for the new talkies. Mankiewicz was well-respected as a writer, but by the time he was offered work on Citizen Kane, he had also developed a well-deserved reputation as a cantankerous and unreliable drunk.
The screenplay for Mank was written by the director’s late father, Jack Fincher, a career journalist who began working on film scripts upon approaching retirement. (He reportedly had submitted a script for Scorsese’s The Aviator, subsequently supplanted by John Logan’s.) The film chronicles Mankiewicz’s writing of the primary draft for Citizen Kane while recuperating from an automobile accident in a small, secluded farmhouse in Victorville, Ca. Assigned a nurse, Fraulein Freda (Monika Gossmann), a personal recording secretary, Rita Alexander (Lily Collins), and Mercury Theater co-founder John Houseman as Orson Welles’ middle-man runner (Sam Troughton), Mankiewicz also had to contend with the farmhouse’s No Alcohol restrictions. Nonetheless, as he writes and reminisces, we are indulged with flashbacks: his experiences writing for David O. Selznick’s RKO with a team of recruited eastern intellectuals like S.J. Perelman, Ben Hecht, George S. Kaufman and, especially, Charles Lederer (Joseph Cross), who also turns out to be the nephew of Marion Davies; being invited to parties at Hearst’s San Simeon estate; his dealings with L.B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg (Ferdinand Kingsley) at MGM, and the Hearst influence on the studio’s surreptitious political propagandizing on behalf of California’s Republican party. Mankiewicz’s original agreement with Welles was as a ghostwriter – no screen credit – but Mankiewicz grows to believe that this script may be the best thing he’s ever written, based on the varied reactions of Welles, Lederer and his beloved filmmaker brother Joseph L. Mankiewicz (Tom Pelphrey), and argues fiercely for shared credit, which he eventually secures. But the most revealing, and damning, flashback relates an elaborate San Simeon costume party in which Mank holds wildly inebriated court with Hearst, Mayer, Davies and their progressively annoyed guests, an elaborate scene showcasing the best and worst of Mank, and the amount of influence, or lack thereof, that his artistic labors and flamboyant personality have had on the culture inhabited by powerful men like Hearst and Mayer.
David Fincher is nothing if not visually scrupulous, and the visual design of his film here is no exception. The black-and-white photography, which has gone through some processing, is still uncannily evocative of films of the period. I was disappointed it wasn’t higher contrast overall, but Fincher got each and every gray tone he wanted. He’s even had print scratches and reel-change marks superimposed – the more he fusses with authenticity, the more attention he draws to the tricks. Relax, Dave, we’re good. The cinematographer is up-and-comer Erik Messerschmidt, and he and Fincher also employ some of the Welles / Gregg Toland long lens/deep-focus compositions for which Kane was famous. Mank and Marion’s nighttime walk through the San Simeon zoo is like little you’ve ever seen before, mischievous, beautiful and haunting. The overall production design (Donald Graham Burt) is amazing as well. Trish Summerville did the spot-on costuming.
Also evocative of the period is the narrative of rich, powerful, straight white men in charge of everything. These kinds of stories are standard-issue Hollywood, and many of them are excellent; but I suspect the attention span of all moviegoers for these kinds of films is going to slowly dwindle, and that’s not a bad thing. Lily Collins’ Rita Alexander, and Tuppence Middleton as Mank’s patience-of-a-saint wife Sara, are well-written roles, and wrought by two very good actresses, but they are definitely background here, more fill-ins than muses of any sort. Seyfried, though, is very good, expertly parsing Marion’s vanity with her sense of self-preservation, and is deserving of her Oscar nomination. The story itself, for me, is compelling; I like the glimpses into the history and background of Citizen Kane, and the surrounding sociopolitical culture of the time. I was also able to follow Jack Fincher’s story structure of the ‘present-day’ writing of the script interwoven with flashbacks of the events and characters that preceded its conception. There’ll be a little too much bouncing around, and a few too many unfamiliar faces, for some in the course of the story, but of all the Oscar-contending films I’ve seen this year, I feel like this one aspired to the most, and achieved most of what it set out to do. I highly, highly recommend this one.
Periscope In The Bathtub 
Pingback: Movies – Handicapping The Best Picture Oscars 2021 | Periscope In The Bathtub