‘Mank’ is a grand contribution to Hollywood history

In one history of the movies, “Citizen Kane” screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz might look like a footnote. The former playwright had a hand in many famous pictures, including “The Wizard of Oz,” but most went uncredited. He was the smartest guy in the room, a drunk and a gambler who was dead at 55. And his kid brother, Joe, who directed and wrote “All About Eve,” would go on to be the betterknown Mankiewicz.

But in another version of Hollywood history, the one David Fincher tells in the glorious new film “Mank,” Herman Mankiewicz as portrayed by Gary Oldman was early Hollywood in all its greatness and tragedy. Working off a crackling screenplay by his late father Jack Fincher, David Fincher has made “Mank” into an incisive look at a complex man who was once William Randolph Hearst’s favorite dinner companion but by 43 was a Hollywood has-been — washed up and laid up

while writing what would become “Citizen Kane” in a bungalow in Victorville in 1940.

Even though it’s filmed in black and white with a big band score (from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross) and made to look and sound like a film of the time, this isn’t some dreamy, nostalgic writeras-hero tale. It doesn’t take a writer to know that there’s nothing more deathly boring and uncinematic as the writing process. Nor is it a referendum on the old “who really deserves credit for ‘Citizen Kane’” debate.

Instead, “Mank” is about the context around “Citizen Kane,” the tarnished realities of Hollywood’s Golden Age, the seductive power of filmed imagery and how a man who was once a friend not just to Hearst, but to Marion Davies, too, would decide to write about them against the advice of everyone in his life.

The film is wry and observant about the movie business and all the things that haven’t changed, as well as those that have. That it’s a Netflix production is a deafening statement of its own. But it also has a beating heart thanks in large part to Amanda Seyfried’s Davies, who beautifully reclaims the life and agency of a woman who history and “Citizen Kane” reduced to Hearst’s showgirl mistress. Mank and Davies are kindred spirits and she is the moral compass of the ridiculous world they inhabit. When Mank is eviscerating everyone in a drunken rant, you’re looking for her reaction. “Mank” isn’t interested in providing the answers, which is just as well. It’s simply telling a story about a man behind so many of our movie memories and making a new one in the process. And it is, without a doubt one, of the year’s very best.

Photos and text from wire services Associated Press Gary Oldman portrays Herman Mankiewicz in a scene from “Mank.”