Hollywood noir about the genesis of Kane is a beguiling masterpiece
Director David Fincher Starring Gary Oldman, Amanda Seyfried, Lily Collins, Charles Dance, Tom Pelphrey, Arliss Howard, Toby Leonard Moore, Tuppence Middleton, Tom Burke
Orson Welles was the young upstart who enraged all of Hollywood by swaggering into town, and claiming he could do everything they’d been doing for years, but single-handed, and better. What on earth could Netflix possibly see in him?
Shortly after funding the completion of The Other Side of the Wind, Welles’s extraordinary long-lost final feature, the streaming service has now turned its attention to his first, Citizen Kane – or rather the great clouds of political scheming and personal malaise from which, in 1941, Kane emerged.
Mank – named for its hero of sorts, the screenwriter Herman J Mankiewicz – is an icily exquisite Old Hollywood noir about the genesis of Welles’s revolutionary film about the rise and fall of a megalomaniacal press baron, which would later become widely regarded as the greatest ever made. It is also director David Fincher’s finest work since his 2010 Facebook-founding drama The Social Network, which was itself unmistakably Kane-like in its audacity and foresight. Shot in velvety monochrome, with a dizzying lead performance from Gary Oldman and a wondrous, multilayered Jazz Age score, Mank feels both like a film for the ages and one hauled up from them: a forbidden tale grave-robbed from the Hollywood catacombs.
It opens in 1940, with the arrival of Oldman’s Mank at a guesthouse in the desert, half-mummified in plaster casts. While laid up after a car accident, he has been pounced upon by the 24-year-old Welles (a terrifically plausible Tom Burke), who has recruited him to write the first draft of his big debut picture – anonymously, though generously compensated. The brief is entirely open-ended, and the chance to do personal, meaningful work a once-in-a-lifetime luxury. But perversely, Mank feels trapped by it. He’d far rather be in the Paramount writers’ room aloofly swapping quips with colleagues, before peppering the studio’s latest potboiler script with his blowdart bon mots.
Yet as the weeks wear on, something personal and d meaningful does scratch its way onto the page. Through an intricate, back-andforth structure ure that slyly mirrors Kane’s own, we discover
Mank’s previous vious existence as s a sort of California highighsociety court rt jester – whose ose mischievous s wit, usually loosened by y drink, makes es him a favoured guest of the redoubtable e newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst (a never graver ver Charles Dance), nce), who, of course, rse, inspired the e character of f Kane himself. lf.
At first,
Mank revels in his wisecracking odd-one-out status in Hearst’s inner circle: in a world of privilege, he’s there on talent, and his talent is not to be sniffed at. Yet there is also a swelling undercurrent of self-loathing – mesmerisingly played by Oldman – as Mank comes to realise that his caustic jabs are just a sideshow; he’s grease in the wheels of power, rather than a spanner in the works.
The film is somehow simultaneously intimate and sweeping: a personal tragedy that doubles as a devious state-of-the-nation whodunnit.
Naturally, movie nerds will have a field day. The attention to detail is both affectionate and exacting, from the cast’s crisp performance styles to the analogue pops and scuffs that occasionally dance across the surface of the image. Yet, Fincher delights in poking holes in his own comfort blanket, stippling Mank with details that would have never appeared in a production of the period. Characters swear, talk sex and politics, and appear semi-clothed; trousers are glimpsed around ankles under bathroom stall doors. The effect is subtly yet potently unsettling: the allure of the era survives, but its veneer of glamour seems more deceptive.
“You’re asking a lot of a motion picture audience,” Mank’s script editor (Sam Troughton) says sceptically after reading his first draft of Kane, before describing it as “a hodgepodge of talky episodes – a collection of fragments that jump around in time like Mexican jumping beans”. As Fincher is no doubt well aware, the same could be said of Mank itself. But every crumb of effort this murky and beguiling wonderwork demands, it repays a hundredfold.
Mank is released on Netflix on Friday December 4
Attention to detail is both affectionate and exacting; from the cast’s crisp performance styles to the analogue pops and scuffs on the images