Citizen Kane wouldn’t be Citizen Kane without Herman J. Mankiewicz, the man who co-wrote—or perhaps even solely wrote—Orson Welles’s 1941 masterwork, almost without getting credit. Eighty years later, David Fincher’s Mank offers a portrait of the unsung scribe, played by Gary Oldman as a bed-ridden alcoholic drumming out a script that would crib from his real-life sojourn at the court of media titan William Randolph Hearst. But Mank, penned by Fincher’s late father Jack, isn’t particularly interested in chronicling Kane’s genesis, or the war Hearst waged to halt its release. Nor is it concerned with settling the authorship feud between Welles and Mankiewicz. “An imaginative weave of scholarship and speculation,” as Justin Chang calls it over at the L.A. Times, the film:
…tiptoes deftly through that partisan minefield, celebrating its hero’s work without succumbing to Welles erasure. The astounding accomplishment of the 24-year-old genius who took Hollywood by storm is left to speak more than capably for itself. This choice, which mostly relegates Welles (a brilliantly transfigured Tom Burke) to a jovial yet commanding presence at the other end of a telephone, comes at the expense of some deeper understanding of the writers’ working relationship. But then, the title isn’t “Mank & Welles.” And its true subject is not just Mank, but the industry that he so loved and loathed.
And what does Mank have to say about that industry, exactly? Steeped in 1930s Hollywood history and studio politics, does the film still sponge up something of our own troubled zeitgeist?
Fincher’s latest has been saluted by some as “a love letter to cinema,” but the cliché, Adam Nayman warns at The Ringer, is off-base, for it threatens to “misinterpret Mank’s ambivalence about its chosen milieu and the power of cinema to reshape reality.” Indifferent to old arguments about Kane’s tortured birth, the film has a much larger scope: to redirect our attention to the power of movies, what they do, and how they can be used. As Richard Lawson remarks at Vanity Fair:
Mank is, in its way, adamant about cinema’s ability to illuminate injustice, to address its agents through pointed allegory. But unlike many navel-gazing movies about moviemaking, Mank is ambivalent, neither overly reverent nor hellbent on skewering Hollywood with inside-baseball satire. We see the industry’s unethical rot, its hypocritical postures—in [MGM chief] Mayer, in [Mayer's right-hand man] Thalberg, in Mankiewicz himself. And we see its graces, its capacity for wonder, its not-always-responsibly-held mirror, shining a fractured and altered version of our world back at us.
It is not surprising that Mank should give ample space to California’s 1934 gubernatorial race. That election saw novelist and activist Upton Sinclair run on a progressive platform that vowed to eradicate poverty from the state. Played by Bill Nye, a.k.a. Bill Nye the Science Guy (a casting choice that’s “a minor stroke of genius,” as per TIME’s Stephanie Zacharek, for “his mere presence is a nod to the supremacy of facts over dangerous fictions”), Sinclair lost to Republican Frank Merriam. But his bid was thwarted, at least in part, by a smearing campaign promoted by Hearst and studio chiefs, a relentless flow of fake news reels which the Finchers suggest Mankiewicz unwittingly inspired. It’s the race—and the role that cinema played within it, as a disinformation machine—that accounts for much of Mank’s timeliness, David Sims contends at The Atlantic:
As Fincher put it, the studio and Hearst “sort of pioneered fake news,” using the glitz and glamour of cinema to manipulate audiences and distract people from a duller reality. This plotline hits hardest in Mank, which is arriving after a drawn-out presidential-election season choked with falsehoods on cable news and distorted social-media feeds. Fincher didn’t set out to make a movie about today’s politics; he’s telling a universal story about trying to change an industry (and a world) in which every system seems freighted with inertia. Mankiewicz isn’t quite a radical, nor is he especially principled. Still, in trying to make sense of his experiences with Hearst through a Hollywood narrative, he transforms a familiar tale about shattered idealism into a revolutionary work of art.
But is this enough to inject the plot with sufficient tension? At Vulture, Alison Willmore raises a very illuminating point when she argues that some of Fincher’s previous films thrive on the frictions between his directing and his writers’ scripts, creating “a tension between what’s on the page and how it’s presented that can feel more interesting than if the two elements were in perfect synch.” That tension is largely missing from Mank:
The film’s early acts lay out the past like a series of informational dioramas requiring supplemental plaques, struggling their way through flurries of introductions to historical figures and awkwardly handled context, more often than not leaving Mankiewicz lost in the busy flourishes of some of the scenes. He’s all too much to scale, sometimes coming across more like an ensemble player in the story than the star.
Willmore is by no means alone in her critique. At The Wrap, Alonso Duralde notes that, in abiding by Mankiewicz’s own screenwriting advice (“You cannot capture a man’s entire life in two hours. All you can hope is to leave the impression of one.”), the film essentially lowers the bar for itself. “Impressions of people and incidents are all that this immaculately produced and beautifully acted film ultimately has to offer,” in which Mank himself is written “as such a quip-for-any-occasion wit that one might mistake him for a character in his brother Joseph’s later hit All About Eve.” And for Slant’s Chuck Bowen:
While Fincher brings a past society rich in political implications to vivid life, he has virtually no governing interest in making us feel for Mank as a human. Individual scenes are astonishing without somehow flowing into one another; instead of feeling as if we’re being drawn into in an inescapable psychological vortex, as in Citizen Kane, we’re given the impression of watching a few dozen short, intellectualized films on the subject of Mank and his cronies.
It's all the more ironic, as David Rooney notes at The Hollywood Reporter, “that in revisiting the birth of a film celebrated for its innovative narrative structure of shifting points of view, Mank's weakness is its lack of a gripping through line.” The whole movie, Anthony Lane echoes at The New Yorker, “has an air of this-then-that, in lieu of a plot, and we are left to work out how, or if, the pieces lock together.”
With Welles pushed to the margins—and the clash over the script’s credits only erupting at the very end—the flickering, discontinuous sense of danger the film evokes draws from Mankiewicz’s own work on Kane. There isn’t a soul in Mank who isn’t aware that the media tycoon of the script is a stand-in for Hearst, and there’s no mystery around how devastating his retaliation will be. That danger, K. Austin Collins writes at Rolling Stone,
…is what gives Mank some, only some, of the tingly chaos you’d expect of a Fincher movie. The threat isn’t exactly comparable to the Zodiac killer; it’s definitely no Amazing Amy (who is?). But what’s clear from the outset is that there’s a great risk being taken in the writing of Welles’ movie. […] One of Mank’s key swerves is in fact its willingness to give credence to the danger of that operation. And it splits itself nearly in two to do so, with the Victorville frame narrative serving as but a backbone for a conflict-ridden, vibrant tour of the years leading up to it.
But this is not, arguably, the most intriguing source of tension the film has to offer. As K. Austin Collins goes on to observe, Tom Burke’s Welles bears a humorously cutting resemblance not only to the real Welles, but to David Fincher himself. And the resemblance, to borrow from Adam Nayman again, only amplifies the richness and complexity of Mank’s project:
It’s intriguing that Fincher, who’s never written any of his movies, would invest his energies in a movie that venerates a wordsmith while also deconstructing—though not necessarily demolishing—the monolithic institution of auteurism. The self-deprecating complexity of this venture—right on down to Burke’s Welles-as-Fincher appearance—is what gives Mank its fascinating tension. For a movie made by a perfectionist, it’s not remotely perfect, with numerous sequences and subplots that feel extraneous or underdeveloped; the fights it picks with certain figures in film history are ultimately losing battles. But it’s nevertheless admirable as a movie of ideas—rich, contradictory ones about art, commerce, and the hazardous intersection between industry and ideology.
In our era of conservative media moguls, anti-socialist propaganda, and electoral hysteria, this is timely material to reckon with.
The Current Debate is a column that connects the dots between great writing about a topic in the wider film conversation.