Mank

Any list of modern-day film auteurs would certainly have to include David Fincher. The wunderkind commercial and music video director (his work in the ‘80s for hit-makers like Madonna, George Michael, and Aerosmith are some of the best stuff MTV ever aired) became a cinematic visionary almost as soon as he made the jump to features. After surviving the troubled production of Alien3 (1992), he made the stylishly silly crowd- and critic-pleasers Seven (1995), Fight Club (1999), and Panic Room (2002), and then went on to make prestige Oscar contenders like Zodiac (2007), The Social Network (2010), and Gone Girl (2014).

Fincher seems an ideal choice to helm Mank, a backstage history about the writing of what many consider Hollywood’s greatest creation, Citizen Kane (1941). After all, Fincher was a kind of “boy wonder” turned great director like Kane’s director, producer, star, and, yes, co-writer, Orson Welles. In fact, one of Fincher’s best music videos, Madonna’s “Oh Father,” is an outright homage to Kane, in which Fincher repurposes shots and techniques devised by Welles and the great cinematographer Gregg Toland for Kane to illustrate the story of a little girl who loses her mother at a young age and grows up with a sad, abusive, alcoholic father. Fincher’s own late father, Jake, penned the screenplay for Mank, so making this film was also a long-standing passion project for the director. It is therefore all that much more shocking that Mank is not only a disappointment; it’s the most ineptly crafted film since the previous year’s notorious bomb, Cats.

Mank plays like a big-budget, A-list student film. Most of the casting is fine but every other aspect of the picture feels ham-fisted, amateurish, or just plain wrong. The litany of terrible choices begins with the screenplay, which is ironic because Mank is a story about a screenplay and about one of the most acclaimed screenwriters who ever lived, Herman J. Mankiewicz. The titular scribe is portrayed by Gary Oldman, who disappears into the part about as convincingly as he did with Winston Churchill in the overrated Darkest Hour (2017)—which won the great actor an Oscar for one of his worst performances.

Fincher and television director of photography Erik Messerschmidt shoot Mank in black & white, as both a way to recall Hollywood during the golden age of the 1930s and ‘40s and as an homage to that era and the films it birthed, such as Citizen Kane. But the digital monochrome on display here bears little resemblance to the rich, deep focus, black & white celluloid used by Welles and Toland.

Similarly, the sound design is meant to recreate the auditory experience of watching an old movie in an old theatre. Sound supervisor Ren Klyce mixed all the dialogue, ambient noises, and score to sound as if they were generated using the methods of Golden Age-era production. When filmmakers choose to recreate the aesthetics of a previous time, I always wonder why they don’t just USE the equipment of that era—it’s not like all this gear is no longer around. Klyce meticulously mixed in crackling, pops, and hissing, as well as a whirring motor sound to ape the noise a 35mm projector makes. But most noticeably, if you watch the movie in SurroundSound, Mank is mixed to sound as if you are watching it from the back of an old cinema without modern sound-absorbing panels or Dolby speakers along each row. It’s a choice that amounts to little more than the visual gimmick of adding reel change cue marks and fake specs of the dirt that usually accompany the end of each reel of a projected 35mm feature. Fincher seems to believe these little touches will please lovers of celluloid, but I think I can speak for most film collectors and projectionists when I say adding fake change-over cues to a digitally created and delivered work is just dumb.

None of these questionable aesthetic choices would really matter if Mank told a good story or if it provided any new perspective on the creation of one of Hollywood’s most beloved, most discussed, and most written about works. But the depth of understanding the father and son Fincher team bring to this generic, lackluster Hollywood docudrama is paper-thin. The screenplay feels like it was written by a first-year screenwriting student who has just read Pauline Kael’s infamous 1971 New Yorker article “Raising Kane,” and watched Thomas Lennon and Michael Epstein’s Oscar-nominated documentary The Battle Over Citizen Kane (1996). If, however, a first-year screenwriting student had turned in Jack Fincher’s script (or the final draft, which was penned by Oscar winner Eric Roth), I’m sure they would have flunked the class because Mank is riddled with the most amateurish mistakes anyone can make when writing a historical picture. 

Nearly every scene attempts to dramatize an anecdote, legend, or minor factoid about the people and events of this era: William Randolph Hearst, his publishing empire, his political involvement, and the lavish parties he threw at his San Simian mansion; Louis B. Mayer, Irving Thalberg, and MGM during one of that studio’s most productive decades; and, of course, the crusty, alcoholic Mankiewicz sequestered out in the Mojave desert by producer John Housman, writing the first draft of the Kane script. Nothing in any scene feels authentic or even credible. Yes, the basic facts of these events may all have happened, but the screenwriter’s job is not to fill out a checklist of events.  It is to bring scenes and ideas to life and to create characters that feel like living, breathing souls. Every moment of this long slog of a movie rings false, forced, and two-dimensional.

A prime example is an early scene in which Mankiewicz invites the young Charles Lederer out to MGM to try his hand at writing the kind of studio “dreck” Mank’s been making his living off. Lederer is whisked into a writer’s room where Mank presents him to the other major literary talents who left New York for the lucrative La La Land – and we get dialogue like:

MANK: You all remember the Algonquin cabin boy, Charlie Lederer – a poor but somewhat talented magazine writer come West to join our merry band. Well, you know most everyone here, right?

CHARLIE: Mr Kaufman?

GEORGE S. KAUFMAN: George is fine, kid.

CHARLIE: Mr Perelman, do you prefer Sidney or S.J.?

MANK: He takes what he can get. Ah, the great Charles MacArthur.

CHARLIE: Good to see you again Mr MacArthur

MANK: Our resident Jack-of-All-Trades Shelly Metcalf

SHELLY METCALF: Kid.

CHARLIE: Mr Metcalf.

SHELLY METCALF: Oh save the “Mr” for the anointed.

MANK: Alas not yet among them, my brother Joe.

JOSEPH L. MANKIEWICZ: “I don’t mind the heat as much as I do the humanity.”

MANK: And the one and only Ben Hecht.

BEN HECHT: Have you been laid yet?

This fingernails-on-chalkboard exchange could have practically been the model for the scene in Jake Kasdan & Judd Apatow’s satire Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007) in which John C. Reilly’s titular up-and-coming musical legend meditates with The Beatles and the Maharishi:

DEWEY COX: That was freakin' transcendental, Paul McCartney. Don't you agree, John Lennon?

JOHN LENNON: Yes, Dewey Cox. With meditation there's no limit to what we can... “imagine”.

DEWEY COX: What do you think, George Harrison of The Beatles?

GEORGE HARRISON: I don't know. You know, I'm just trying to get more songs on the album.

RINGO STARR: And as Ringo Starr, I'm not so interested in meditation, I just like to have fun.

The broad comedy of Walk Hard delightfully skewers every terrible cliché of the biopic genre. But in Mank, these tired tropes and laughable dialogue exchanges are not only trotted out with no sense of irony, they serve no function because they neither advance the story nor help to define the milieu. 

The clunky introduction scene is shown to be all the more unnecessary by the very next sequence, in which the great literary wits are called into the head office and indulge in a game where they take turns making up the treatment for their current assignment on the spot. A good director (or even a half-assed community college screenwriting teacher) would have cut the introduction scene and suggested the writer use this cynical improv game to illustrate the New York sophisticates’ contempt for Hollywood while simultaneously highlighting the different personalities and styles of the famous scribes (without painting big ugly name tags on them).

Similarly, there’s a scene in which Mankiewicz enters the office of MGM production chief Irving Thalberg and smells grilled hotdogs. A flustered Selznick tells his secretary not to allow “the Brothers Marx” into his office again. The reference is to the famous story of when Groucho, Chico, and Harpo Marx were making A Night at the Opera at MGM and, annoyed that Thalberg would keep them waiting for long stretches of time, stripped down to their underwear, built a fire in his fireplace, and preceded to roast potatoes in the office. Sure, it’s a fun story, but just tossing in references to individuals who don’t factor into the narrative or have any impact on the characters serves no purpose in a movie.

The more it goes on, the more Mank starts to feel like little more than a collection of Easter Eggs for cinephiles to recognize and feel good about recognizing. Like a pretentious version of the little nuggets dropped into every Star Wars or Marvel movie, these references are meant to function as subliminal back-pats for superfans; but they end up degrading their respective “cinematic universes” by rendering them small and contrived.

Mank is crammed full of so many footnotes, movie titles, and semi-famous names dropped by nearly every character in the film, you’d think the actors would trip over them during the many walk-and-talks Fincher puts them through in an attempt to distract from all the necessary (and unnecessary) exposition. On the mandatory second viewing of this Netflix Original that I assigned myself before writing about it, I counted up the moments (and entire scenes!) that exist only to refer to people, events, and legends that fans will know—as if each mention will activate dopamine hits in the mind of a cinephile.  There are almost ten cumulative minutes of such scenes the real Mankiewicz would never have witnessed but into which the Finchers insert him, like a drunken, hyper-intelligent Forest Gump.

But the dimwitted title character Tom Hanks played in Gump is a far more multi-dimensional protagonist than the passive (if opinionated) witness to history that Gary Oldman embodies as Mank. In most of his screen time, the Herman J. Mankiewicz of Fincher’s movie is an observer. Like the fictional police sergeant Mark Walberg played in Patriots Day, Peter Berg’s 2016 docu-thriller about the Boston Marathon bombers, Mankiewicz is present at nearly every key event that happened at RKO and MGM between 1930 and 1940. But unlike Walberg, he doesn’t do much except absorb and comment on what he sees so he can later use it when writing Citizen Kane.

Much of what the fictional Mank witnesses has to do with the politics of the era. In this respect, the film is no different than thousands of other films, books, articles, and other histories about the making of Citizen Kane, but it lacks the accuracy one would get from a real biography. Mank is most interested in making connections between the politics of the 1930s and those of contemporary times. A key subplot concerns the socialist novelist and activist Upton Sinclair’s 1934 campaign for Governor of California. Once again, these scenes touch on actual events, but not ones that Herman J. Mankiewicz participated in—although some things his brother Joseph did in real life get imputed to Mank here. The script touches on the fascinating political debates that occurred throughout Hollywood before America entered WWII, but the inept dialogue Fintcher and Roth create is too insultingly simplistic to be be taken seriously.

Putting aside the claims about Orson Welles not contributing to the writing of Citizen Kane—popularized  by Kael in her incomplete, inaccurate, self-serving, and now long debunked article—the way the Finchers depict Welles in Mank perpetuates the same simplistic characterizations as in the rest of this picture. The one time we see “the boy wonder,” as Mank and Housman refer to him, is when he comes to see Mankiewicz in the desert to chew him out over the writing credit. Welles (Tom Burke) throws a tantrum in which he smashes up furniture in Mankiewicz’s room, and the great Mank is inspired to add a scene in the script in which Kane destroys his own bedroom in a fit of rage.

Welles’ outburst in Mank, however, seems to lack any motivation, unless you already know that the tantrum scene in Citizen Kane was indeed inspired by an incident at Chazzan’s Restaurant in which Welles and Mankiewicz argued and Welles trashed the place. But if you knew that, you also know that the real incident happened long after Mankiewicz had written the first draft and that most present at the dinner agreed that the two creatives were fighting over changes Welles had made when he rewrote Mankiewicz’s second draft of Citizen Kane.

Of course, rearranging the timeline of events is perfectly fine in a biopic or docudrama. Indeed, changing the reality of what motivated incidents, or even who did or didn’t do what, is also totally legit when telling alternate histories of real events. However, inventing actions or dialogue that make no logical sense in the context of a given scene, or are motivated only by the excuse of “but that really happened,” is never acceptable. Yet that is exactly what we get in this key, embarrassingly executed scene.

The one thing that Mank gets somewhat correct is its depiction of Marion Davies, Hearst’s paramour and the inspiration for the character of Kane’s shrill, untalented second wife, Susan Alexander. Davies is the most mysterious character at the heart of all discussions about the making of Citizen Kane, because so few of the actress’s movies survive, and most that do are silent. So we have a hard time picturing what she might have been like in real life. Two-dimensional depictions of her in Hollywood films and TV shows—Peter Bogdanovitch’s The Cat’s Meow, in which Kirsten Dunst played opposite Edward Herrmann’s weak take on Hearst; the flat HBO movie RKO 281, in which Melanie Griffith and James Cromwell brought little to the respective roles; and The Hearst Davis Affair, a sluggish docudrama where Virginia Madsen and Robert Mitchum fail to bring much passion to the titular couple—have helped correct the impression in the public consciousness that Davies bore any resemblance to the fictional Susan Alexander, but they haven’t given us much insight into the woman herself. 

Thus, the best scenes in Mank are the fanciful one-on-one exchanges between Mankiewicz and Davies (Amanda Seyfried). These quiet scenes are still tinged with some horrendously contrived dialogue, but at least they lack the relentless expository blather crammed into the mouths of most other characters. Their moments together are allowed to breathe and stretch out to the point where viewers can finally start to at least wonder what the real Marion Davies might have been like.

Mank raises the central question: why did Herman J. Mankiewicz create such an unlikable character who had such obvious parallels to a woman he admired and was friendly with? If the viewer chooses to see Oldman’s cheery dismissals of “It’s not her” and “It’s not you,” in scenes where he’s confronted with this question, as some brilliant piece of subtle acting, I suppose they can. But to my eyes, neither the script, the direction, nor the performance provides an answer or any satisfactory dramatic tension by the evading of the question.

The dynamic between Mankiewicz and Davies ends up as inert as every other aspect of Mank: the big set pieces are merely Oscar-baity speechifying; the staging of historic moments amounts to little more than an empty exercise in surface re-creation; the political parallel of Hearst’s yellow journalism to the fake news and alternative facts of contemporary propaganda infotainment is shallow. It boggles my mind that anyone could enjoy this movie. Those with little advanced knowledge of the places and players depicted will find the film impossible to follow, and those who do know all this history already should be infuriated by how badly and ham-fistedly the film embodies it. Mank easily ranks as the worst film of 2021.