RAISING KANE
Mank is a passion project that holds irresistible allure for film buffs
Mank, a years-in-the-making passion project of David Fincher based on a script by his father, Jack, is a movie made for critics, cinephiles and deep-dive film historians.
A whirligig retelling of how Herman Mankiewicz came to write the groundbreaking 1941 film Citizen Kane, filmed in velvety black and white and studded with fetishistic details of Hollywood's Golden Age at its most silky and coyly subversive, Mank is designed to send its intended audience aloft on a cloud of nostalgia, albeit with pangs of remorse for what we've lost.
Which makes the film's disappointments all the more painful, and confounding. On paper, Mank promises equal measures of penetrating insight and pure delight: In the 1920s and 1930s, Mankiewicz — played to perfection by Gary Oldman — was a successful, if self-destructive, screenwriter in Hollywood. When the film opens, it's 1940, when a radio wunderkind named Orson Welles has
received carte blanche to make whatever movie he wants and hires Mank, as he's known, to create a script.
In homage to Citizen Kane, Jack Fincher wrote Mank in the same non-linear, elliptical style, bouncing from the bed where Mank writes his first draft while recovering from a car accident, back to when he befriends the powerful publisher William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance), and Hearst's much younger companion, Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried). There are scrumptious set pieces at Hearst's estate San Simeon, where Davies compares notes about Hitler and Lowell Thomas with Irving Thalberg and Norma Shearer (Ferdinand Kingsley, Jessie Cohen) and, later, attends an extravagant costume party.
Through it all, Mank keeps up a steady patter of arch commentary, delivering punny witticisms with the practised sarcasm of the resolutely un-star-struck. That is, when he isn't stumbling and mumbling in a drunken shambles: Although one could argue that as high-functioning an alcoholic as Mankiewicz must have been able to hold his liquor, Oldman and Fincher have chosen to portray his binges with W.C. Fields-like excess.
One of the most revolutionary things about Citizen Kane was cinematographer Gregg Toland's use of light, shadow and deep focus. Here, Erik Messerschmidt does his version with crisp, meticulously staged images that he inexplicably blows out with distractingly bright backlights.
It must have been a ball to do. But it's questionable whether any of the fuss will appeal to anyone but the most dedicated Citizen Kane fans. Even with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's propulsive piano-and-drum score, the movie often feels too talky and tendentious by half.
Mank gleefully examines the disreputable underside of oldschool Hollywood and its minions — the spit under the polish. But it's weighed down by windy expository passages that stop the film in its tracks.
Mank's best scenes belong to Seyfried, who gives her character warmth, life, intelligence and humour. She's a figure of stunning, ethereal beauty, looking as though she's lit from within. But she's also supremely self-aware, and probably smarter than any of the men posing and posturing around her. Seyfried's the beating heart of a movie that's constantly teetering on the edge of pastiche, feeling more play-acted than fully inhabited.
Mank addresses the controversy around who deserves credit for Citizen Kane. It's another angels-on-the-head-of-a pin argument, but it's a question Mank accidentally answers in favour of the auteur. “I built him a watertight narrative and a suggested destination,” Mankiewicz says of Welles upon delivering a 327-page first draft. “Where he takes it — that's his job.”