‘Mank’ and the death of moviegoing
COVID has claimed nearly 300,000 lives and put thousands of companies out of business. Last week, the pandemic may have taken down an entire industry. Movie theaters had been suffering for years, but the announcement last Thursday that Warner Bros. would stream all of its 2021 movies on HBO Max on their day of theatrical release has to be seen as a kind of death notice.
Warner’s announcement was sobering, tragic even. And it made all too much sense not to seem overdue. Warner wants to trade the uncertainty of releasing films to theaters one at a time for the certainty of the subscription model.
Releasing movies has always been a crapshoot. In contrast, Netflix has more than 70 million subscribers in this country and more than 160 million worldwide, who pay something like $14 a month, each and every month. As the kids say, you do the math.
If last Thursday marked a movie milestone, it’s interesting that “Mank” began streaming on Netflix the very next day. A beautifully shot homage to old Hollywood, it stars Gary Oldman as the alcoholic screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, engaged in the creation of the 1941 masterpiece “Citizen Kane.” Or at least its first draft.
While many have marveled at the audacity of the young Orson Welles (Tom Burke) to take on press baron William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance), it was Mankiewicz who was really biting the hand that fed him.
He’s seen in flashbacks as a frequent dinner guest at Hearst’s San Simeon mansion and a friend and confidant to Hearst’s lover, Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried).
Employing the meandering chronology of “Kane,” the film recalls Depression-era fights between studios and screenwriters, and the film moguls’ creation of fake news and newsreels to cripple the candidacy of Upton Sinclair, a progressive candidate for governor of California. It doesn’t take much to see that “Mank” wants to paint MGM maestros Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard) and Irving Thalberg (Ferdinand Kingsley) as the inventors of the kind of emotionally manipulative
smear jobs perfected by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News.
While the film shows a bedridden Mankiewicz finishing his massive script in a sprint, it’s clear that “Kane” would reflect bilious sentiments harvested over the course of what W.H. Auden dubbed “a low dishonest decade.”
“Mank” is a very smart film, gorgeously produced. Even so, it’s easier to admire than love. Only time will tell if viewers will want to watch it more
than once.
And while “Mank” is a prestige project for Netflix, it’s also a rather odd fit. Given its vast streaming catalog, Netflix has made a conspicuous choice to avoid films much older than “Footloose.” It makes sense given the service’s assiduous courtship of viewers raised in the 1980s. Do those viewers even like films released in black and white?