Mank

Mank shows that David Fincher can make something that's nothing like the rest of his filmography, not bound to his own rules and conventions. It may not be entirely accurate in its depiction of how Citizen Kane was written but it's fascinating to see Fincher of all people go against auteur theory.

Gary Oldman is amazing. He's witty, self obsessed and unable to back down regardless of the consequences. His relationship with Amanda Seyfried is great, especially a walk around the gardens in which she shows she's so much more insightful than her peers give her credit for.

David Fincher's direction is a lot stronger in its visual and audio composition than its narrative construction. Going back to old Hollywood he crafts a film that truly belongs there, the black and white cinematography and the overall audio really feel of the time. However, the flashback heavy structure of the film robs it of what little momentum it has.

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross also change things up from their usual output, displaying a completely new set of skills. Their score is fantastic, feeling era appropriate in the same way everything else does and it's definitely some of their least subtle work.

Mank is a movie aimed squarely at film buffs that tells the story of the writing of Citizen Kane. I am a film buff. I love Citizen Kane. I am this movie's target audience. It is bad as a movie, and worse as a movie eager to be compared with the works of Orson Welles.

In the film, Gary Oldman plays alcoholic scriptwriter Herman Mankiewicz, who holes up in the middle of nowhere with a broken leg and the assignment to write a full script in a month. He bases the script on the life of powerful millionaire William Randolph Hearst. In flashbacks, we see Mank's dissolute life as a screenwriter, drunk, and witticism machine, as well as his friendship with Hearst's mistress, Marion Davies.

1. Mank as a movie

I want to take about Mank's failures as a film for film buffs and it's failures as Welles-lite, but I don't want that to get in the way of the most important point, which is that this movie is simply dull. Oldham is persuasive as Mank, but the character is like one played by Thomas Mitchell in old 40s movie; a side character whose witticisms are fun but never make you want to find out what makes him tick.

The alcoholic writer isn't an inherently uninteresting subject, but it's also not an inherently interesting one, and the movie doesn't give us any particular reason to care about Mank. The flashbacks are sometimes interesting and sometimes not, but in neither case do they change the movie from basically being a guy in a house typing and getting blackout drunk. There is nothing within the movie that makes you curious about the characters or the situation - the only thing that kept me watching was curiosity about Citizen Kane, and if I'd never seen that movie I wouldn't have finished this one. The acting is good, and Amanda Seyfried is actually exceptionally good as Davies, but there's really not much to this at all. It doesn't pull you in at the start, and the end feels as meh as the rest of it.

2. Mank as a film buff movie

The best thing about Mank is the gorgeous black-and-white cinematography, which does a dead-on impression of Greg Toland's work in Citizen Kane, down to emulating specific scenes. Set and costume design are also first-rate.

But as behind-the-scenes look into Citizen Kane the movie is a failure. One thing I wanted to know was why, if Mank was friends with Hearst and with Davies, he turned on them so savagely.

Some say that the treatment of Davies was the thing that most harmed Kane most of all. True, Not only was it reportedly the main reason Hearst wanted to destroy the movie, but Davies, a talented light comedian pushed into inappropriate roles by her sugar daddy, was charming and well-liked (which Seyfried captures wonderfully) and threw big Hollywood parties and because of that, Hollywood would not rally around Kane as Hearst attacked it. Even Welles admitted, years later, that he had been unfair to Davies.

So why did Mank trash her? The movie offers a simplistic answer involving Upton Sinclair that doesn't make much sense and, when I researched it, isn't remotely what happened. There is no thoughtful attempt to consider why a writer would use his friends as grist for the mill, even though other writers have successfully looked at the very subject without reducing it all to petty, self-righteous vengeance.

The movie also falls onto the long-exploded Pauline Kael side of the who-wrote-Kane debate, suggesting Welles did pretty much nothing on the script. A little research shows scholars have conclusively refuted this (one of the top of the "most helpful" IMDB user reviews gives a good overview of this).

The only reason I kept with this movie was for the real-life story that it couldn't bother to tell.

3. Mank vs. Orson Welles

By making a movie about Citizen Kane, and making it look just like Citizen Kane, director David Fincher would seem to be *daring* people to compare his work with Welles. But it falls short of Welles work in every non-superficial way.

Welles was certainly a big fan of flashy cinematography. He could be gimmicky. But there was always intent to it. Gimmicks were always both "oh, cool!" and "look how that emphasizes the point he's making in a fresh way."

Beyond the flash, Welles was a filmmaker who never gave you all the answers. He gave you clues. Citizen Kane is about the search for Rosebud, but once you know what it is, you still don't know Kane. It's another clue, but it's up to the viewer to decide how to sort these clues. Welles gave you jigsaw puzzles with some pieces missing and some extra pieces. It was true of Kane and pretty much everything he did through his final film, The Other Side of the Wind. Welles did not consider people explicable. They lie about their motives to others and themselves, they change from moment to moment and year to year. It is the complexity, not the cinematographic tricks, that make Welles one of history's greatest filmmakers.

But Fincher's Mank isn't complex at all. His story arc is straightforward. He's a brilliant drunk. His motives are simplistic. He's self-destructive in a predictable fashion. Like all of us he has his good points and his bad points, moments of spite and moments of grace, but then, so does every character in a Hallmark movie.

And the gimmicks in Mank are just gimmicks. If you know Kane's opening scene you'll recognize the falling whisky glass as a callback, but what does it say? Not a thing. Not. One. Single. Thing.

Mank is a dull, unimaginative film that is infuriating because it has so many of the hallmarks of a good one. That makes it feel like a cheat. I regret watching it, and recommend everyone skip it.

"Mank" from David Fincher is a Netflix production. This provider of streaming services has produced a couple of good films the last few years, such as "Roma" (2018, Alfonso Cuaron) and "The Irishman" (2019, Martin Scorsese). For Fincher it was his first feature film since "Gone girl" (2014), and a very different film then the ones I have seen from him thusfar. Apart from "Gone girl" I have seen "Seven" (1995), The game " (1997) and "Zodiac" , all films with touches of crime in it. The script of "Mank" is based on work of the father of David Fincher, Jack Fincher.

For me "Mank" is above all an ode to the Hollywood studio system at its peak in the late '30s and early 40's, just like "Blancanieves" (2012, Pablo Berger) is an ode to the silent movies and "The artist" (2011, Michel Hazanavicius) to the early talkies. Not that Hollywood is depicted as a sort of heaven on earth, see the malicious manipulations with respect to the election of the governor of California in 1934, but in the other mentioned films the sun does not always shine either.

The main character of the film is Herman Mankiewicz. A perfect role of the versatile Gary Oldman. Herman is the older brother of director Joseph Mankiewicz (1950, "All about Eve") and has been somewhat forgotten. He has (co)written the scenario for films such as "Dinner at eight" (1933, George Cukor), "The Wizard of Oz" (1939, Victor Fleming) and above all "Citizen Kane" (1941, Orson Welles).

In the 70's film critic Pauline Keal wrote an article in which she claims that the scenario for "Citizen Kane" was not a co production between Welles and Mankiewicz but actually written solely by Mankiewicz. This theory has since become obsolete. As a matter of fact I think that the article of Keal has to be interpreted in the context of a discussion she was involved in with the directors of the "Nouvelle vague". These directors saw the director of a movie as the author of the movie. Keal saw a movie as team performance. I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. The relation of a director to his movie is different from the relation of the writer to his book or the painter to his painting. Nevertheless the director still is the central point where all the creative decisions converge.

Does "Mank" try to revive a theory which has already been found incorrect? I don't think so. The films ends with the first draft of the script, which is the point in time where the role of Mankiewicz ends and the role of Welles begins.

The subject of the film is the making of "Citizen Kane" (1941, Orson Welles). "Mank" tries to do that in the style of this film. Therefore "Mank" is (of course) in black and white. The film uses also many flashbacks. The present is Mankiewics working on his script in a remote country house, the numerous flashbacks tell the story of his Hollywood past. In one respect "Mank" falls short of his subject film. In "Citizen Kane" we get numerous opinions (and thus a multi facetted image) of Charles Foster Kane. In "Mank" we see all the action through the eyes of Herman Mankiewicz himself.

Like Oliver Stone's "JFK a masterfully executed distortion of history Fine acting and cinematography, but no comparison to those of "Citizen Kane."

Fincher's villainization in MANK of Welles as a plagiarist runs contrary to the facts. To quote Robert Carringer, the expert on the matter: "A virtually complete set of script records for Citizen Kane has been pre- served in the archives of RKO General Pictures in Hollywood, and these provide almost a day-to-day record of the history of the scripting. Once this record is reconstructed and all the available pieces of evidence are matched to it, a reasonably clear picture emerges of who was responsible for what in the final script. The full evidence reveals that Welles' contribution to the Citizen Kane script was not only substantial but definitive (370)... "Herman Mankiewicz's principal contribution to the Citizen Kane script was made in the early stages at Victorville. The Victorville scripts elaborated the plot logic and laid down the overall story contours (398).... The Mankiewicz partisans would have us believe that this is the heart of the matter and that by the end of Victorville the essential part of the scripting was complete. Quite the contrary... Major revisions begin as soon as the script passes into Welles' hands, and several important lines of development can be discerned in sub- sequent phases of the scripting. One of these is the elimination of dramatically questionable material, especially of a large amount of material drawn from Hearst. Another is a fundamental alteration of the nature of many of the scenes; this may be described generally as a shift from scenes played continuously to scenes fragmented according to montage conceptions" (399). (Here, the evolution of Mankiewicz's rather humdrum scenes involving Kane and Emily into the film's concise, witty, montage is a perfect example.), Yet another is the evolution of Charles Foster Kane as a character. The principal strategy is the replaying of certain key situa tions and moments in his life over and over again as a means of testing and discovering the character (399)....":Not even the staunchest defenders of Mankiewicz would deny that Welles was principally responsible for the realization of the film. But in light of the evidence, it may be they will also have to grant him principal responsibility for the realization of the script" (400)." (See Robert L. Carringer. "The Scripts of 'Citizen Kane.'" Critical Inquiry, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1978pp. 369-400; Also cf. The Making of Citizen Kane, 985). More interpretively. Welles was preponderantly an adapter of others work, whether from Shakespeare, lesser classics or thrillers, whether for radio theater, stage theater or film. "Citizen Kane" can be viewed as Welles' adaptation of Mankiewicz's ungainly, 250-page "American," his first "script" for "Kane."

I'm a huge fan of both "Citizen Kane" as well as David Fincher's films, so I was extremely excited to see this. Because of how much I enjoy Fincher's films as well as how good the trailers looked, I wanted to (safely) see it on a big screen rather than wait until Netflix. Needless to say, this is a good movie, but not a great one--and it does not quite live up to the quality one would expect from a Fincher film.

The story focuses on Herman Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman,) the screenwriter who worked--often tempestuously--with Orson Welles to write "Citizen Kane." However, the amount of time the film spends on material related to "Citizen Kane" is relatively little. Instead, the film tends to focus more on Mank's political activity, personal life, ascent into the movie business, and alcoholism throughout the 1930s. Oldman does a good job playing Mank, and is completely believable in the role. As one can expect from a Fincher film, the editing and cinematography are top-notch. The stylish, black-and-white aesthetic that feels both slightly understated (in the best way possible) and posh is beautifully complemented by a relatively steady camera and editing techniques common to films of the 1930s and 40s. The screenplay is generally well-written as well, although it doesn't feel as taut as you would expect in a Fincher picture, and the leisurely pacing is very well done.

Despite these strong qualities, "Mank" unfortunately is not quite great. The film develops Mank as a character, but he is portrayed in too static of a manner to really make for an engaging protagonist, or even one that can simply have clear ripple effects on the rest of the film's narrative and the characters around him. His characterization is not especially interesting. Fincher probably uses flashbacks a bit too much in the story, as many of the flashbacks to the early 1930s don't do too much to provide additional context to Mank as a character or the time period as a whole. Also, the supporting characters (such as the roles played by Amanda Seyfried and Lilly Collins) are not especially well-developed. As a result, the film doesn't completely work as a character study. However, it is still a generally well-acted and well-shot depiction of early film history that is worth seeing for viewers interested in the subject matter. 7/10