Oldman brings Old Hollywood to life in Netflix’s ‘Mank’
Man behind ‘Kane’ lived a hard Hollywood life
David Fincher takes on the story of “Citizen Kane” and its troubled screenwriter. Review,
Director David Fincher’s gloriously retro “Mank” is less an homage than a faithful re-creation of an old Hollywood film – from that tinny sound to the lush black-and-white sheen. It might seem like an oddity to modern viewers’ eyes, although there’s a timelessness to it, too, as it imagines the origin story of a classic.
Gary Oldman leads the superbly acted drama ( ★★★g; rated R; in select theaters Nov. 13 and streaming Dec. 4 on Netflix) that digs into the disputed genesis of “Citizen Kane,” Orson Welles’ 1941 drama about the rise and fall of a media baron infamously based on newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Fincher’s long-gestating “Mank” was written by Fincher’s father, Jack, before his death in 2003 and stars Oldman as sardonic Oscarwinning “Kane” screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, who tussles with 24year-old filmmaking wunderkind Welles (Tom Burke), various studio power players, and the high-profile mogul who inspired Charles Foster Kane.
You don’t have be a Turner Classic Movies devotee to appreciate what Fincher pulls off here, though by using old-school scrolling credits and typedout scene settings, the filmmaker pretty much proclaims to hardcore cinephiles that this movie will be your jam. “Mank” is about an artist bound to express his own truth much more than it is a “Kane” companion. (It does work well as that, too.)
While healing from a broken leg after a car accident, the alcoholic, compulsive gambling Mank toils at a ranch house in the Mojave Desert to crank out a “Kane” script. His team – including secretary Rita (Lily Collins), who becomes a Mank confidante – tries to keep the booze away, yet Mank’s acerbic personality comes out as he writes his masterpiece.
It’s the worst-kept secret in Hollywood that “Kane” will be Welles’ takedown of powerful newspaper magnate Hearst (Charles Dance), and everyone from Mank’s younger brother Joe (Tom Pelphrey) – “I hear you’re hunting dangerous game,” he tells Mank – to saintly, understanding wife Sara (Tuppence Middleton) try to talk him out of it.
Those scenes intertwine with flashbacks throughout the 1930s where Mank makes an enemy of MGM head Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard); strikes up a platonic friendship with Hearst’s young mistress, movie star
Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried); and finds himself on the opposite political side of Hearst, whom all these personalities revolve around in some way.
Fincher uses “Citizen Kane” as a plot point and a visual guide and pulls from its structure, for better and for worse. Welles’ appointed Mank handler, John Houseman (Sam Troughton), tells the writer that his first “Kane” draft is “a hodgepodge of talky episodes, a collection of fragments that leap around,” and with its many subplots, “Mank” definitely takes a page out of that jumble.
The flipping among timelines succeeds in some places and loses the film’s focus in others, though it manages to reflect current politics and a movie industry desperately trying to get people back to theaters. And in one instance, Fincher wonderfully uses that structure to show Mank’s mirrored power struggles with foils Hearst and Welles.
Three years after winning anOscar for playing Winston Churchill, Oldman is just as impressive as Mank, a complex, thoughtful underdog whose snappy retorts and puns don’t do much to disguise his internal insecurities and outward struggles with self-destructive vices.
Fincher has pulled together an impressive supporting cast around him, especially Seyfried in a career-best performance. The actress superbly inhabits a starlet wanting a career makeover but whose smarts and talent are underestimated by the men around her, with Mank the exception. Burke lends an unpredictable physicality to the eccentric Welles, while Dance gives a cooly understated, quietly intimidating performance as Hearst.
“You cannot capture a man’s entire life in two hours. All you can hope is to leave the impression of one,” Mank says of Kane. The same argument could be made for “Mank,” a wonderful throwback about a flawed figure who took on a hostile era in Hollywood with choice words and major chutzpah.