How better to fight myth than with myth? It may be all that we have, after all. Penned by his late father, Jack Fincher, David Fincher brings to the screen a tall tale of Herman J. Mankiewicz’s journey, and battle over, the writing of perennial top-10-topper Citizen Kane. Sidelining any of Welles’ own contributions to the Oscar-winning script, the Finchers whittle their purview down to the efforts of one man to push against the confines of a system to which he has found himself tragically conceded.
Operating in two timelines, we find Mankiewicz forced into a solo writer’s retreat at the North Verde Ranch in Victorville, facing an imposed deadline for completing his “draft”, and restricted from indulging in his rampant alcoholism. By his side are two complying women to see him through: stenographer Rita Alexander (Lily Collins) and housekeeper Fräulein Frieda (Monika Gossmann). Meanwhile, in a sequence of flashbacks we see the oppressive restraints he faces as a studio-hired writer and the according beefs with Louis B. Mayer and newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst that inspire his screenplay. The heart of the latter plot being his platonic relationship with Marion Davies, which is rendered with pure strangeness by their contrastingly charming rapport and its absolute lack of sexual tension. Mank’s heart belongs to his stalwart wife, Sara (Tuppence Middleton), who serves as his quippy cheerleader and caretaker when needed, and he never seems to be tempted by any of the women at his side. The asexuality of Mank is among its most curious attributes, despite allusion to debauchery, and serve to define its title character as a rough-around-the-edges saint.
Orson Welles, effectively impersonated by Tom Burke, figures in as a distant dictator beckoning Mank to get his work done. The film keeps Welles at an arms’ length for 90% of its running time, finding antagonism instead in the questionable principles of the studio powers that be, until a regrettable last-minute shift. In particular, Mank portrays Mayer and Hearst’s political meddling in the 1934 California gubernatorial election in an effort to defeat socialist writer Upton Sinclair. Oldman’s Mank is a man of values caught up in a machine that only seeks to devalue and de-individualize, and though he always seems to be speaking his mind, regardless of how intoxicated he is, he also seems to be going with the flow. The film’s greatest pleasures are in realizing that environment, that context, the dynamics therein, and in depicting a working writer’s reluctant but voluntary participation within them (and his own half-enjoyment thereof). It’s a shame then that the film also includes preachy hagiography instead of doubling down on the ambivalent dissection of processes that Fincher’s set of tools would better serve. Boldly taking on the megalomania of Hearst (who is rendered here as a pointedly dull figure by Charles Dance) as the basis for Kane, Mankiewicz is barking up the proverbial wrong tree and inviting only further trouble into his career. The odyssey-like structure of discouraging visitations Mank receives at his getaway cottage in conjunction with the behind-closed-doors business seen in flashback adeptly articulate the overwhelming presence of capital in culture. Mank hardly uncovers a seedy underbelly previously uncovered but it does convincingly underline a certain big boss sleaze and create the impression of a borderline-dystopic money-for-nothing landscape.
The fight over Mankiewicz’s credit on the screenplay becomes the film’s climactic gesture and its accompanying sequence has sparked debate around Kane’s authorship. For pure auteurists, such quibbles over the authorship of a screenplay aren’t of great interest to begin with. For historians, more so (if you read one piece on the subject, read Welles historian Joseph McBride’s comprehensive overview). There is no questioning Kane’s authorship on a directorial level and it is a feat of Fincher & Fincher’s film is to even move the debate outside of that realm—not to argue for Mank’s contribution to the script as absolute but to argue for the merit of the script itself as well as its symbolism as a subversive gesture. However, to do so, Fincher’s film and Fincher’s script must resort to its own propagandizing. What Mank does best is to convey some kind of atmospheric immersion into the Hollywood factory from the screenwriter’s vantage point, rounded up like cattle to produce fast ideas with punchy hooks, appeasing studio heads, diva directors, and money men with delusions of grandeur. As a cynical but romantic exercise in depicting the imagined Hollywood with biting doses of venom, the film effortlessly swims through chunky scenes by means of unapologetically referential dialogue modelled in part after the style of its era, shuffled forward momentously but almost via automation by David Fincher’s clinical, clean set-ups and sequence building. The film sweeps you up in such a way that you almost have to actively work against its pace and mood to notice that indeed Fincher’s slick direction is omni-present, however acquiescent.
It’s not that the form and content are either so opposing nor blissfully compatible, but surprising in their utter lack of tension in how they work together. In fact, Fincher’s precision does an adequate job of encasing such heavily written material, and even at times bringing it to vivid life. The pleasure of the film is in the performances (Oldman and Seyfried are sublime and play perfectly to the Classical Hollywood pastiche), and the way the blunt and overwrought dialogue is given full space to lean into its reverential indulgences (because, this film, which works against reverence, only can do so in the efforts of another reverence).
The result is a peculiar one: a film at once in love with Hollywood history and intent on setting a record straight, yet foolishly bound up in its own a-historicism, tripping over its own agenda over and over until it finally tumbles in its petty denouement. It seems silly to spend much energy arguing with something that hardly puts up a fair fight, but it would also be a shame to focus too much on the liberties taken that we wouldn’t pick apart so eagerly were it taking on another subject. In its own way, Mank only further builds an already pervasive myth of Welles and builds on top of it further myths. But as a movie about a man caught up in a machine, a man who does not betray his “declaration of principles”, and who fights for his one day in the sun, it’s a touchingly downplayed, heroic (mythic?) underdog tale effectively and incisively woven through an artificial rendering of that most artificial place. It is, at last, just another dream from the dream factory. It’s hard to fault fiction with being fiction, and there may be too much being made of the film’s cartoonish grappling with Welles, which is but a glib parting shot. The clear target here is of the bureaucracy, politics, and capitalistic nature of Hollywood production.
In the end, its most interesting context may be extratextual. Here Fincher surrenders to the script—contrast this with the comparably wordy The Social Network which is overwhelmed by formal flourish and design, a total conquering of writerly style by directorial mood—much in the spirit of the “message” of his father’s tale, and however inadvertently actively works to poke holes in his own auteurist narrative. (Although a voice in the back of my mind still wonders if something more discreet or mischievous could be going on). But for whatever myth you wish to choose, be it that of Mank, Welles, or Fincher, they each have their own seductive appeals, and here they do battle, which may serve no productive purpose other than providing passing amusement. They are, however, brought together in the end by something in common: an obsessiveness with the final word.
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