Mank Is A Cunning Reimagining On The History Of Film And A Scathing Critique On The Film Industry
By telling the story of the creation of Citizen Kane through the eyes of someone who isn’t Orson Welles, David Fincher Crafts a Narrative that reveals the cynical past and present of Hollywood
Tristan Young @talltristan
There’s a frustrating, if awkwardly articulated, truism about Hollywood in that it loves nothing more than to see itself onscreen. Any depiction of its own caviller ambitions, moral righteousness, and progressive crusading in a world dominated by otherwise corruption and consumption- it eats it up. You see it in films like La La Land or Birdman, with the very nature of Hollywood and its erstwhile importance being proselytized with dramatic virtue. You see it in the Oscar speeches in which celebrity actors profess their liberal credentials with booming and condescending oration, insisting it is from their insular ecosystem that a better world can grow. For you see, their status and protection from the common immiserations of everyday life gives them clairvoyance into how to build a better future, and a platform in which do so. Hollywood is here to save the world, and they love movies that show it.
It should come as no surprise considering the vocation in question, but much of this is fiction. An intricately crafted, foundational, and vehemently prosecuted one, but still a fiction. An industry of meat grinders and narcissists, with delusional modern prophets serving as tone deaf exemplars for their messaging, Hollywood is no more benevolent or a liberal bastion for a better world than any multi billion dollar apparatus with a sharply drawn bottom line. But the engineers and purveyors of this fiction ensure that it is persistent and pervasive, burrowing its narrative of good will and earnest intentions into the optics in which we observe Hollywood as a whole. The film makers and actors that play along and prop up this charade are elevated and rewarded by the Academy Of Motion Pictures, massaging their easily manipulated egotism and creating a symbiotic circle of conspiracy and dependency.
From time to time however, someone within this ecosystem gets to the point where they simply have had enough and don’t want to play ball anymore. These people understand Hollywood for the cesspool of craven self interest that it is, no more liberal or progressive than a republican lobbyist, or more accurately than the republican that is currently lobbying them. Sickened by the disingenuous and performative gestures that feign liberal ethics in only the most shallow and dissonant of ways, these people at times attempt to pierce that armor of artificial good will to show the movie making business for what it is. Once, long ago, that person was screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz. Now, it’s director David Fincher, making a film about- as fate would have it- Herman Mankiewicz. Long relegated to something of a foot note to a particularly momentous moment in cinematic history, the making of Citizen Kane, Fincher’s new film- succinctly titled Mank- re-examines Mankiewicz’ role in making the seminal film and uses it as an apparatus to launch a scathing critique against the ideological cynicism and avarice of Hollywood as whole.
Gary Oldman as Herman Mankiewicz
The briefest of synopsis of Mank, directed by Fincher but with the screenplay penned by his father Jack and left dormant for years, would merely state it’s about the other guy who wrote Citizen Kane; not Orson Welles. Indeed, Mank makes the case for the validity of the auteur theory of cinema but interrogates whom exactly the auteur was. Welles is historically seen as the monolithic presence behind Citizen Kane, having stared in and directed it. Fresh off his iconoclastic radio career with War Of The Worlds, Welles was a consummate Hollywood outsider who’s brand was nevertheless so ascendant, the insiders gave him carte blanche to do whatever he wanted with his film project. To do it with whomever he wanted. This brought him to Herman Mankiewicz, lovingly and derisively referred to simply as Mank by his friends and enemies of which he spent a career cultivating many.
Mank, played by Gary Oldman, was an east coast playwright and critic in the 1930s who migrated to Hollywood amidst the cinematic gold rush, with assurances that his only literary competition there were comprised mostly of idiots. Sure enough, Mank integrated comfortably into the boys club of insider dealing and extra curricular posturing that was required to make it in Hollywood- at least as Fincher’s rendition illustrates him. Eventually Mank crosses paths with Welles and the two team up on writing the great American epic that would eventually become Citizen Kane. In Fincher’s Mank, the case is strongly insistent that it was Mank, not Welles that was almost solely responsible for drafting the screenplay, and it’s in those pages that the nuances and narrative ambition that made Citizen Kane so monumental are truly embedded. Mank is so acutely assured of this posture that it presents it mostly as a forgone conclusion, despite the fact that is the source of open debate to this day. The crux of the film’s nucleus is instead Mank’s experiences within Hollywood that compelled him to write such an invective to begin with. It’s in telling this tale that Fincher exposes to his audience what Hollywood is and always has been.
Watching Mank is to appreciate it is a valuable appendix to Citizen Kane itself in that understanding one helps explain the other and vice versa in a tautological sense. Citizen Kane, released in 1941, tells the story of Charles Foster Kane, a media magnate of enormous influence. So powerful was he that wealth, the most lavish of romances, and all of the luxury in the world were at his beckon call. However his intimate and neurotic insecurities always pushed away only those whose genuine love and affection he needed most. His problems manifest to more pronounced degrees as his fails to parley his media empire into a successful bid at national politics. Eventually Kane dies alone and unfulfilled, famously whispering “rosebud” upon his demise. Citizen Kane however, is not pure fiction in the strictest of terms. At the time of it’s production and release the majority of the upper class Hollywood intelligencia frantically understood it to be a clear hit job on real life media mogul William Randolph Hearst (played by Charles Dance). Hearst’s life full of boundless reach and hubris was the basis for Citizen Kane. He was a major power player in Hollywood; with his hands in many pies not the least of which was unofficially pulling the strings at MGM. He bank rolled pictures he wanted to see made, ensured actors of his choosing were made stars (including his mistress), and steered the ideological proclivities of Hollywood.
Amanda Seyfried as Marion Davis
Mank details Mankiewicz relationship with Hearst, working as many writers and producers did in the structures and firmaments of his design. At first the two got along rather gingerly. Hearst, always the curator of the lavish and gauche Hollywood party, and Mank, always the droll orator with a sharp anecdote or rejoinder, seemed like a fine pairing. Eventually, Mank’s famously rampant alcoholism caused him to wear out his welcome in Hearst’s inner circle, but that is merely scratching the surface of their falling out. The heart of the film documents Mank’s disillusionment with Hollywood as it, at the behest and guidance of Hearst, got into bed with the republican GOP in the California Gubernatorial election. At the time democratic candidate Upton Sinclair (with a fun little cameo from Bill Nye) promoted truly progressive values, especially for the 1930s. Fair pay, unitization, protection of rights- these ideas made up the platform for Sinclair. When Mank could look past his own self-destructive indulgences what he saw in Sinclair was impressive and inspiring. What Hearst and his sycophantic menagerie of Hollywood’s upper echelon saw was higher production costs & taxes, and lower property values. And so to Mank’s shock and horror he saw his colleagues align with the republicans, parroting their disingenuous and misleading talking points, and using the impressive infrastructure of their movie studios to do it. While the main target of the film’s ire is Hearst’s pernicious influence, it also excoriates the idea that Hollywood was ever truly progressive.
Mank as a film largely succeeds because it not only breaks down the barriers of a seemingly hermetic and insular Hollywood and entangles it with state and national politics of the era, but also mirrors how what happened in the 30s still happens now. Just as liberal progressives are incoherently derided as socialists without a hint of context to what that is supposed to mean, so to did Hearst and his cohorts label Sinclair. It deftly illustrates what an empty boogeyman label the term has always been. Modern partisan politics like to illustrate “real” Americans as middle class white people being demonized by an immigrant invasion. In Mank, studios that Mankiewicz used to work for churn out propaganda ads, casting actors that he personally knows, along with all of their attendant wealth, as simple farmers fearful for the direction the country is going. These same reels attempt to indoctrinate voters by showing only minorities to be aligned with Sinclair’s more progressive agenda. Nearly a century later it’s the same lines and Mank argues it was Hollywood that showed the prodigious political class how to perfect such tactics. Forget the Hollywood that you see awash in praise in awards ceremonies- this is the reality of it. For every film like Argo, that argues by exporting the operational bureaucracies of Hollywood it can cure the world of it’s most challenging extra national complexities, or Birdman which insists upon the cultural gift to the world that Hollywood claims to be, it’s exceedingly refreshing to watch Mank strip away that veneer.
Fincher’s coordinating of structural and narrative allusions to Citizen Kane also does an excellent job of drawing attention to Mankiewicz’ contribution to the film in tandem with his disillusionment with Hearst and Hollywood. Mimicking the ‘cinnamon bun roll’ of story telling as Oldman’s character succinctly puts it when describing his screenplay- that was wildly ambitious when deployed in Citizen Kane- the film is a circular maze of flashbacks and the present of the film. Each trip into Mank’s memories informs why he is so compelled to write the screenplay. In showing with each subsequent anecdote why he sours on Hearst and his iron grip on film making, Fincher explains not only the history of the moment, but also how that history implies that of course the story of Citizen Kane could only be the brainchild of Mankiewicz. In doing so he ties his two theses- the reality of Hollywood’s cynicism and the central role of Mank in writing Citizen Kane- together through a roundabout way of story telling. Doing so validates Mank’s theory on biographical narratives in that you can’t tell the tale of a person’s life in two hours; you can only hope to leave an impression. To that end, the film’s structure of flashbacks only provides us with hints of insights and implications, leaving us to infer motivations to an extent in the film’s present.
Opposite Oldman, Charles Dance as William Randolph Hearst
What makes this work so well is that this is specifically the kind of story telling that Fincher has gravitated towards over the last 10 years or so. One of the great career evolutions of modern cinema has been Fincher, first known for surreal and violent mysteries with traumatic twists ala Seven or Fight Club, turning to making films characterized almost solely by people simply talking in rooms. His later day run of The Social Network, Gone Girl, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and now Mank are remarkable examples of just how riveting a film that is almost pure dialogue can be with a tight screenplay and even tighter editing. Fincher recreates the lighting and framing of Citizen Kane for occasional dramatic effect, anachronistic by today’s standards but revolutionary back then. However, he directs the transitions through the frames and shots with the natural camera movements and perfectly distanced stage blocking that his films have been known for. Watching characters interact in Mank is like watch chess pieces maneuverer around the board with the precision and intent of long form stratagems. The score provided once again by Fincher collaborators Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, is- as to be expected by now- fantastic. Completely eschewing the aesthetic continuity of a silver age era cinematic, the score is more starkly modern recalling a prestige drama or romance from the 90s era of the super star zenith. The music at times serves as a sobering requiem, such as when one of Mank’s colleagues is at his nadir of despair over his complicity in Hollywood’s smear campaign against Sinclair. At other points it provides veritable jolts of near synaesthesia in its luminosity such as the moonlight stroll Mank takes with Hearst’s lady friend, actor Marion Davis played by Amanda Seyfried. When listening to the lush and rosy string arrangements it’s wild to ever think that Reznor’s main gig was Nine Inch Nails.
While Oldman is terrific in the dry and playful incisiveness that characterized Mank, one can’t help but observe the film treats him with a little too much reverence. Perhaps that Fincher viewed Mank as the ideal vector in which to direct his umbrage towards Hollywood, he goes a little easy on him. As previously stated, Mank was a ruinous alcoholic to the point that it sent him to an early grave. Yet the film seems to characterize his drinking problem as something more akin to the corporal price one must pay to achieve such moral and spiritual clarity in a world rank with sin and corruption. When Mank caves in and abandons his burgeoning attempt at sobriety for a belt of hard liquor, the film doesn’t illustrate it as a precipitous moment, but rather coincides it with a spark in his productivity. Mank is often anywhere from buzzed to black out when dealing with the scheming gatekeepers of Hollywood. The film suggests that level of numbness is required to swim with the sharks, as if Mank is something of a martyr for taking the plunge. When his wife Sara, played with an understated mixture of grace and authority by Tuppence Middleton, finally confronts him over his alcohol abuse and his plutonic affairs (which was admittedly a very astute observation on her part) she lets him off with almost a wink and nudge, which he all too comfortably reciprocates. Oldman does a very effective job of articulating the genuine care and gratitude he affords to all supplemental characters he can share any one of life’s quiet moments with. Perhaps that’s why he receives so little push back from all but the clear antagonists of the film, but this aspect of the Mank’s depiction remains problematic.
After Citizen Kane’s release, it went on to win only one Oscar- the one for best original screenplay. It was Mankiewicz, not Welles, who would be the one to accept it. A lifetime later, the film and Welles are revered as iconic. To be sure, this is indeed rightly so. The film is fantastic and in no small part due to Welles directorial prowess, actor’s instincts, and pioneering ambition. He and the film should absolutely be celebrated. And yet Mankiewicz went on to be largely forgotten, laundered through and largely excised from history with the kind of precision that could not come arbitrarily, only with intent. Hollywood has spent nearly the entirety of existence manicuring and sanitizing its image and its history. It has been largely successful. But through the pushy, self-deprecating, and at times obnoxious intrusions of people like Mank and Fincher, that polish can still fade. In an industry of narcissism, sycophancy, and corruption, there are always a few people that have just had it. They deserve the credit for saying so, one way or another.
Mank is streaming on Netflix now.