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Mank
The personal, political and creative friction that birthed Citizen Kane is the subject of David Fincher’s latest, a ravishing yet despairing portrait of Kane’s veteran screenwriter Herman J Mankiewicz ( Gary Oldman) whose contribution to Orson Welles’s debut film was quickly overshadowed by the 24- year- old wunderkind’s own ascent. Coming down firmly on the side of Pauline Kael’s New Yorker essay ‘ Raising Kane’, the film locates the origins of Citizen Kane’s satirical exploration of power and megalomania in Mank’s own friendships with the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst ( Charles Dance) and Hearst’s mistress, the Hollywood starlet Marion Davies ( intelligently played by Amanda Seyfried).
Anyone who knows anything about Citizen Kane will of course know that Hearst tried to block the film’s release, but Fincher presents his movie as a labyrinthine noir to dig a little deeper into the reasons why Mank’s apparent betrayal of Hearst cut so deep. Shooting in shimmering black- and- white to both evoke the romance of 1930s Hollywood and heighten the looming darkness of fascism’s global rise ( and America’s own insidious lurch to the right), Fincher cuts between Mank’s furious efforts to finish the screenplay for Orson while bed- bound following a car accident ( Welles is played by Tom Burke) and his position years earlier as a hard- drinking, hard- gambling, high- society court jester who managed to exploit his journalistic talent as a wordsmith to get a seat at the Hollywood table just as the talkies were coming in. The film’s dyspeptic view of the potentially damaging ways emerging media can be exploited by the callous and the power- mad can’t help but echo Fincher’s The Social Network, but Mank also functions as a sardonic autopsy of Hollywood’s Golden Age by a filmmaker who knows where the decaying bodies are buried.
On Netflix from 4 December
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