Caned able, BUT VERY geniuswho raisedKane
Mank (12A) Verdict: Cherishably intelligent ★★★★★ Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (15) Verdict: Worth sitting down for ★★★★☆
PSYCHO, Mary Poppins and Citizen Kane are the unlikeliest of cinematic bedfellows, but they now have one striking thing in common — they have all inspired some terrific filmmakers to hold up a mirror to their own industry, with beguiling results.
In the excellent 2012 film Hitchcock, Anthony Hopkins played the great director, and Helen Mirren his wife Alma, as he crafted his masterpiece, Psycho.
A year later, the making of Mary Poppins was the backdrop to the charming Saving Mr Banks.
Now, it’s the writing of Citizen Kane, the tale of a monstrous media tycoon that has topped more ‘Best Movie Of All Time’ polls than any other, providing the framework for a marvellous new Netflix film, Mank.
The director, producer and star of Citizen Kane was, of course, the mighty Orson Welles, still just 25 when the film was released. But in Mank he has only a walk-on part.
David Fincher’s film focuses on brilliant but alcohol-sodden screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz (a swaggering Gary Oldman, giving one of the performances of his career).
He shared the writing credit, and in due course an Academy Award, with Welles. Yet as Mank asserts, that was an injustice. For the screenplay, at least as this film sees it, the glory should have been all his.
As befits a picture about such an accomplished writer and wit, Mank is beautifully and wittily written. In this instance, happily, there is no doubt as to the provenance. The original script was by Jack Fincher, the director’s screenwriter father, who died in 2003. He wrote it in the 1980s, but the film was never made.
NOW that it’s finally out there, it really is one to cherish by anyone with even half an interest in prewar Hollywood. Laid up, recuperating from a road accident, Mankiewicz is under orders from Welles (Tom Burke) to get the Kane screenplay finished quickly. An efficient English secretary (Lily Collins) is appointed to take dictation, with Welles’s right-hand man, John Houseman (Sam Troughton), detailed to oversee the process.
From that springboard, the film propels us back in time through the 1930s, superbly evoking the political, social and economic uncertainties of the period as seen through the glittering curtains of Tinseltown.
Some are captivated by Mankiewicz and his endless wisecracks; others are repulsed.
He falls platonically in love with actress Marion Davies (Amanda
Seyfried), who begs him not to model Charles Foster Kane on her sugar daddy, William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance).
He tussles with producer Irving Thalberg (Ferdinand Kingsley) and with movie mogul Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard). ‘If I ever go to the electric chair, I’d like him to be sitting on my lap,’ says Mankiewicz of Mayer. And all the while he somehow stays married to his long-suffering wife back east (Tuppence Middleton), generally known as ‘ poor Sara’. I have watched Mank twice. The first time, I wondered whether the exquisitely-polished dialogue, the way every other line seems to be an immaculately-fashioned quip, might get tiresome.
But those concerns receded as I wallowed in its intelligence, its ingenuity. Wisely, Fincher has made it in black and white, deliberately yet never pretentiously in the style of Citizen Kane itself, with time-and-place captions presented as typewritten script directions. The jazzy score is perfect. The suggestion that Welles was in some ways the biggest, most controlling monster of the lot, outdoing even Kane and his alter ego Hearst, is delicious and audacious. The performances, led by Oldman’s, are all fantastic. It is a glorious film.
■ MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM, an adaptation of August Wilson’s 1984 play about music and race, captures another blooming era in the flowering of American culture — 1920s Chicago and the making of early blues records.
WILSON was inspired by the real Ma Rainey, known as ‘the mother of the blues’ and played here with barnstorming charisma by Viola Davis.
The story unfolds i n Hot Rhythms recording studio, where Ma, used to calling the shots, finds her authority questioned by her band’s volatile trumpeter, Levee — wonderfully played in what was tragically his last screen performance, given while already suffering from the colorectal cancer that killed him earlier this year, by Chadwick Boseman.
With or without that moving f ootnote, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is really worth sitting down for. The director is George C. Wolfe, whose credits are mostly on Broadway, and because he makes no real attempt to hide the film’s theatrical roots, some of the dialogue falls a little flat.
But the music is fabulous, so is Davis, and — t i pped f or a posthumous Oscar nomination — so too is Boseman.
■ Mank is available on netflix from today. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is in select cinemas now and on netflix from December 18.