Mank | Little White Lies

Mank

06 Nov 2020 / Released: 04 Dec 2020

Silhouette of a person holding a cane in a dimly lit room with a window in the background.
Silhouette of a person holding a cane in a dimly lit room with a window in the background.
5

Anticipation.

It’s been six long years since Gone Girl. Anticipation is at fever pitch.

4

Enjoyment.

Whatever you were expecting... it’s not that.

5

In Retrospect.

A complex, cynical delight, to be pored over again and again.

The man behind the man behind Cit­i­zen Kane is the sub­ject of David Fincher’s sparkling paean to clas­sic Hollywood.

Ladies and gen­tle­men, by way of intro­duc­tion, this is a film about trick­ery and fraud, about lies.” So said Orson Welles in the open­ing of his rev­o­lu­tion­ary 1973 film F For Fake. A fair num­ber of David Fincher’s films are, come to think of it, sim­i­lar­ly elab­o­rate games of cat and mouse, some which span gen­res and decades.

He has made a habit of delight­ful­ly wrong­foot­ing view­ers for much of his career, and in tak­ing on the con­tentious his­to­ry of a film fre­quent­ly cit­ed as The Great­est of All Time, he shows no signs of stop­ping. Mank, his alter­na­tive his­to­ry of Cit­i­zen Kane, might as well begin with a direct quote from Kurt Von­negut: All of this hap­pened, more or less.”

The year is 1940; the des­ti­na­tion, a charm­ing ranch in Vic­torville, Cal­i­for­nia, where job­bing screen­writer and chron­ic alco­holic Her­man J Mankiewicz (Gary Old­man) has been sent to dry out and recov­er from a bro­ken leg. He’s also under con­tract to com­plete a script for a young film­mak­er named Orson Welles (Tom Burke) who occa­sion­al­ly calls to check in.

But aside from a few vis­i­tors and the com­pa­ny of his British typ­ist Rita Alexan­der (Lily Collins) and Ger­man house­keep­er Fräulein Fre­da (Moni­ka Gross­man), poor old Mank is left to his writ­ing and his thoughts, which play out in flash­backs, lead­ing view­ers on a steady jour­ney through the self-destruc­tive for­ma­tive years of Cit­i­zen Kane’s oft-for­got­ten second-in-command.

The tot­ter­ing, tus­sled fig­ure Mankiewicz cuts on the MGM lot speaks to the glo­ry days of the stu­dio sys­tem – writ­ers gam­ble away their pay­cheques on a coin toss while a top­less typ­ist sits at a desk. It’s a boy’s club, sure, but when he leaves Cul­ver City for an engage­ment at the lav­ish Hearst Cas­tle (known as San Sime­on) he becomes acquaint­ed with the quick-wit­ted star­let Mar­i­on Davies (Aman­da Seyfried) who remem­bers him from a past run-in and is more than capa­ble of hold­ing her own against Mank’s candour.

Black-and-white image of a woman wearing a feathered hat and coat, sitting at a table with glasses.

Soon enough he enters into the favour of pub­lish­ing mag­nate William Ran­dolph Hearst (Charles Dance) – who seems fond of Mank’s unique sen­si­bil­i­ties – and becomes privy to the com­ings and goings of the Hol­ly­wood elite. Specif­i­cal­ly, Mank starts to com­pre­hend the nest of vipers in which he’s built his home, and becomes dis­il­lu­sioned with an under­bel­ly of greed and cor­rup­tion he finds increas­ing­ly hard to rec­on­cile with his per­son­al beliefs.

This was a man, after all, whose films were banned from being shown in Nazi Ger­many by Joseph Goebbels unless the title cards bear­ing Mankiewicz’s name were removed. The son of Ger­man Jew­ish immi­grants, he had achieved quite the rep­u­ta­tion as a dra­ma crit­ic for The New York Times and The New York­er, dubbed the fun­ni­est man in New York” by fel­low crit­ic Alexan­der Woollcott.

After mak­ing the move to Hol­ly­wood as a screen­writer he became equal­ly well-regard­ed for his wit and com­mand of dia­logue. One of his most sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tions to cin­e­ma was the Kansas sequence of The Wiz­ard of Oz, com­plete with the sug­ges­tion that it should be shot in black-and-white. (As was not unusu­al at the time, Mank’s work on Oz went uncredited.)

There’s no whataboutery here; Mank is quite explic­it in its depic­tion of Her­man J Mankiewicz as the sole author of the screen­play that would become Cit­i­zen Kane, and Orson Welles as an occa­sion­al Tin­sel­town blowhard rather than a close friend. But with its gauzy black-and-white cin­e­matog­ra­phy and crack­ly audio it evokes a sense of mem­o­ry or day­dream rather than reality.

The flash­backs, that com­prise the major­i­ty of the film, are the frag­ments of a trou­bled alco­holic dis­il­lu­sioned with his career and con­tem­po­raries, reflect­ing on a decade of debauch­ery. This is the account of events Mank him­self might have giv­en, had he ever been asked. But his­to­ry is writ­ten by the vic­tors, and even an affec­tion­ate – if not flat­ter­ing – recon­sid­er­a­tion like Mank can’t change that.

The shadow of Orson Welles still looms over the film industry like a Colossus; a gilded symbol of a bygone era.

Biopics of mod­ern Hol­ly­wood tend to skew toward tired Oscar-bait hagiog­ra­phy – a term which has come to rep­re­sent the glossy, clas­si­cal­ly-scored, unchal­leng­ing works which seem to all have been cut from the same piece of cin­e­mat­ic cloth. Old­man him­self starred in one three years ago, Joe Wright’s Dark­est Hour.

But David Finch­er is David Finch­er, and his take on the genre proves it is pos­si­ble to present a his­tor­i­cal nar­ra­tive with­out star­ry-eyed rev­er­ence. His rep­u­ta­tion as a per­fec­tion­ist pre­cedes him but it pays div­i­dends in a film like this; metic­u­lous­ly designed to look and sound like a con­tem­po­rary of Cit­i­zen Kane rather than a film mere­ly about Kane, it’s Netflix’s rich­est pro­duc­tion to date, com­plete with a bewitch­ing Trent Reznor and Atti­cus Ross score that wouldn’t feel out of place in a 1940s screw­ball comedy.

Just as the script of Cit­i­zen Kane is cen­tral to the film’s plot, so too is the script of Mank cen­tral to its suc­cess. Writ­ten by Fincher’s father Jack in the 1990s, it was intend­ed to be filmed after The Game, but no stu­dio would finance the project due to the insis­tence it be filmed in black-and-white. Per­haps the suc­cess of Roma con­vinced Net­flix to finance Finch­er; either way, entrust­ing him to make the film on his terms has undoubt­ed­ly paid off. There’s a time­less qual­i­ty to Finch­er Sr’s words which have the same acer­bic lilt as their subject’s, but cru­cial­ly go to lengths to show this sto­ry has no real win­ners or losers. Hol­ly­wood makes a mon­key out of us all.

Man in a hat contemplating over a woman lying on a bed, in a black and white image.

The shad­ow of Orson Welles still looms over the film indus­try like a Colos­sus; a gild­ed sym­bol of a bygone era. I drag my myth around with me,” Welles said, in an 1967 inter­view with Play­boy mag­a­zine, and now oth­ers drag it around for him instead. In 2018 he was still mak­ing head­lines, as Net­flix released The Oth­er Side of the Wind to crit­i­cal acclaim. Mankiewicz, mean­while, after win­ning an Oscar along­side Welles in 1942, nev­er wrote anoth­er orig­i­nal screen­play, and died from com­pli­ca­tions relat­ing to his alco­holism in 1953. This trib­ute to his genius and tragedy seems fitting.

Finch­er – despite cer­tain cinephiles remain­ing scep­ti­cal of his auteur sta­tus – has always reject­ed the idea that the direc­tor is an omnipo­tent fig­ure (some­thing Welles him­self seemed to buy into, at least a lit­tle, evi­denced in that same late-stage inter­view with Play­boy) and Mank demon­strates how no man is tru­ly an island. It’s a scathing and sur­pris­ing­ly pre­scient attack on the whole rot­ten busi­ness of movie-mak­ing, but it’s also a deeply sad film – one that recog­nis­es the real peo­ple behind the title cards and what is sac­ri­ficed in the relent­less pur­suit of fame and glory.

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