Mank

Rating: R
Runtime: 2 hours, 11 minutes
Director: David Fincher

Quick Impressions:
I need to watch Citizen Kane again.  I’ve never been a fan. (That’s not something I often volunteer because I worry it makes me sound like a pretentious contrarian.)  (Actually it’s because I never go places where anyone would care.  That’s not really the kind of line appropriate to toss out while the checker rings up your groceries.  “You’re probably wondering what I think of Citizen Kane!  Well, I didn’t care for it.”)

My husband and I saw the Orson Welles classic for the first time together when we were dating and found it underwhelming.  Oh, I mean, visually it was impressive, but the story left us cold.  We didn’t connect to it, perhaps.  (Strange when you consider that William Randolph Hearst and my grandma shared either a great grandmother (or a great-great grandmother?).  They were cousins somehow or other, so the story was practically written about my own family!  And I can’t even tell you the number of snow globes I’ve broken in my day!  They don’t even let me in curio shops!)

After watching the lauded classic, I confidently declared to my now husband that I much preferred the way The Simpsons does Citizen Kane.  (Not only is the Bobo episode fantastic, but how about that random retirement party scene?)

But that was almost twenty years ago.  Maybe in my youth I wasn’t ready for Citizen Kane.  Now I need to watch it again because I really liked Mank, and I have the sneaking suspicion that many of its key scenes and images visually echo the Orson Welles classic.  (I just can’t be sure how many because I can’t remember Citizen Kane that well!)

The Good:
For a David Fincher movie, Mank is surprisingly low on dread.  Ordinarily, Fincher’s films fill me with an increasing sense of horror that builds and builds and builds until nothing much happens.  By the time nothing has happened, it doesn’t matter much that the horrible thing never came because the building anticipation has nearly exhausted me.  With Fincher, the dread lies in the journey, not the destination.

Now, it is true that Mank is the kind of movie that would make my daughter throw a blanket over her head.  She’s not afraid of anything gruesome or evil, but she just can’t take interpersonal conflict (or even the hint that some might be coming).  If someone is about to be embarrassed or have an awkward conversation or be shot down in love or hurt someone’s feelings, you can rest assured that my daughter will be watching the scene through a blanket.  Of course my daughter wasn’t watching this movie with us.  Good thing!  She would have suffocated!  Protagonist Herman Mankiewicz (whose surname I can remember how to spell thanks to a remark his witty wife makes in a restaurant) is already an embarrassed disgrace at the beginning of the film.  So how does he get to such a sorry state?  Most of the movie is told in flashback, so we know we’re going to get there eventually.  That’s the only sense of rising dread in the movie, the feeling that Mankiewicz will eventually fall out with all of his powerful friends.  It’s rather unsettling (but nowhere near as creepy as…say…that slow burning scene in Zodiac when Jake Gyllenhaal goes into that house and nothing happens).

What’s cool about this movie is that it’s about the writing of Citizen Kane, and it’s presented to us with a structure very similar to Citizen Kane.  Form mirrors content to the point that we find ourselves entrapped by a tightening ring of oppressive circular flashbacks.  Mank is writing Citizen Kane, but he also seems to be living it.  He is the tragic figure at the center of this story in just the same way he places Hearst in the center of his screenplay.

I’m positive we get some visual echoes of Citizen Kane.  I noticed so many (and those are so pronounced) that I am sure there are others that escaped me because I don’t remember Citizen Kane very well.

So I’ve never been big on Citizen Kane, but I can’t resist metadrama, and there’s so much of that going on here I find myself suddenly interested in the screenplay Mank is writing when I never was before.  Also, as a creative writer myself, I’m often drawn to stories about writers and the writing process.

To me, Mank’s story is much more interesting than I ever found Kane’s.  I have never particularly aspired to be obscenely wealthy and powerful (which is convenient), but I find myself having some crisis of conscience about my responsibility to ensure I use my words wisely every other second.  The world is just a big, horrible, mess, and nobody ever wants to have contributed to that, especially not through some glib remark. What happens to Mank is truly crushing, tragic indeed.  He manages to achieve the exact opposite of what he stands for.  He furthers a cause that he opposes.  And he indirectly has a hand in the death of a friend.  These things happen because he values being clever.  He’s a gambler.  But he realizes too late that those around him are playing a different game by a different set of rules.  Yes, he’s the cleverest all right.  But what does that achieve? 

It’s actually lovely to see a man come to realize the power of his words.  One brilliant part of this film is that Mank stops undervaluing himself.  In the end, he produces something great.  His brother tells him something like, “You made yourself the court jester.”  Everyone seems to realize that.  But his screenplay points out that the great and powerful people have made themselves what they are, too, and they somehow failed to see that when they were mocking him.

That’s why I want to see Citizen Kane again because now I find myself deeply invested in this man’s work.  Thanks to the delightful (highly sympathetic) performance of chameleon Gary Oldman, I really want Mank’s best work to be as earth-shatteringly great as the rest of the world seems to think.

I also loved getting a behind-the-scenes look at Old Hollywood.  Now granted, most of what’s written about Hollywood is usually called a lie by someone.  I’m sure this is rife with liberties and historical inaccuracies.  But it’s still fun to be like, “Wow!  Look!  There’s David O. Selznick!  And there’s Louis B. Mayer!  They look just like their pictures!  Hey cool!  It’s Irving Thalberg before he was an award and his wife Norma Shearer!”  If you like classic movies and the era in which they were made, this is a really fun watch.

Some of the performances here are truly exceptional.  Oldman is wonderful to watch, easy on the ears, too!  He speaks in a delightful wheeze and constantly delivers one-liners and salient wise-cracks.  I never knew much about Herman Mankiewicz before.  (I’m much more familiar with the work of his younger brother Joe (played here by Tom Pelphry).)  But Oldman makes him so charming that I’d be more than happy to pay half his salary myself.  I like him better here than as Winston Churchill, but he won that Oscar pretty recently, so I don’t know that he’ll pull off another nomination this year.  (This year is so strange, and I haven’t been following any of this as carefully as I normally would, but I’ve heard much more buzz for Chadwick Boseman and Anthony Hopkins.)

I do think Amanda Seyfried has a real chance at winning Best Supporting Actress for her against-type turn as Marion Davies, Hearst’s genuinely devoted, long-term movie star mistress.  Here Seyfried is different than I’ve ever seen her.  Not only does she add a welcome spark to the movie, but she plays a character so unlike her usual screen persona. 

The rest of the supporting cast is good, too.  Arliss Howard is spot on as Louis B. Mayer.  (At least, he seems like Mayer as I’ve imagined him.) I like all the women Mank surrounds himself with.  Lily Collins is only there as a supporting character, but she has her own riveting drama going on.  As Fraulein Freda, Monika Gossman shows us another side of Mank.  And I loved Poor Sara (Tuppence Middleton), the much put upon wife who seems almost as feisty and witty as her husband.  (I joked to my husband that I plan to change my name to Poor Sarah.  It has a nice ring to it.)

Ben Kingsley’s son Ferdinand brings real menace and bite to Irving Thalberg.  Charles Dance knows exactly how to play Hearst with intimidating, calculated restraint, and Jamie McShane perfectly highlights the tragedic aspect of Shelly Metcalf.

And did you know Bill Nye (the Science Guy) plays Upton Sinclair?  That seems quite appropriate given Sinclair’s message and the obvious parallel that’s being drawn to our present day political situation.

I just realized that the screenplay for this film was written by David Fincher’s father, Jack Fincher.  I saw the name in the credits, but I didn’t realize he was the director’s father.  I thought maybe they were brothers.  Fincher’s father died in 2003, so I would now love more backstory about the writing of this screenplay and why David Fincher chose to make the film. It’s odd that the movie seems so relevant to today’s political climate.

Mank’s cinematography deeply intrigues me.  I’m positive at least some of the shots are echoes of Citizen Kane.  I’d like to watch the movie again and show it to my daughter.  Sure, she’ll have a blanket over her head the whole time, but I’ll get another look at Erik Messerschmidt’s cinematography.

I also found the score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross quite interesting, catchy at times, but different from what they usually do.

Best Scene/Most Oscar Worthy Moment, Gary Oldman:
This is also a great scene for Seyfried (and Dance).  Very late in the film, Mank shows up to a dinner party obscenely, obnoxiously drunk, and then goes on a rant of excessive length as he describes a great idea for a movie.  Even mentioning this scene feels dangerously close to spoiler territory since it plays a lot like the moment the detective gathers everyone together to reveal how the murder was committed at the end of a mystery.

Best Scene Visually:
The central image of Mank lying in that bed with crumpled papers all around him is so evocative of Citizen Kane.

My favorite visual comes each time a car approaches the house where Mank is writing.

The reveal of the short film Mank finds so repugnant is well done, too.

Best Action Sequence:
Our introduction to Marion (and Hearst) is disorienting in the best way.  Mank’s surprise appearance is a surprise even to him.  Granted this is more a conversation than an action sequence, but the conversation happens during an action sequence. 

Most Oscar Worthy Moment, Amanda Seyfried:
Seyfried is excellent in all of her scenes.  We’re fans of hers, and I’d love to see her win an Oscar.  One of her strongest moments comes when she says the wrong thing at a gathering and then wanders off alone (followed by Mank) through the modest grounds of her castle.

The Negatives:
If we re-watch Citizen Kane, and I discover that my initial impressions of the film were correct, I’m going to be very disappointed.  At this point, I need that movie to be profound, the career best work of a brilliant writer with personal access to the feet of clay of a great man.    If what Mankiewicz wrote actually isn’t all that great, then what is the point of this entire movie?

One of the things I like very best about Mank is its flair for the metadramatic.  It provides a scathing critique of itself when the Houseman character (Sam Troughton) tells Mank everything that’s wrong with the screenplay he’s writing.  This film has exactly the same weaknesses as Houseman finds with the  Citizen Kane script.  It is made up of a series of flashbacks, scattered recollections, and the story is not spoon fed to the audience in the world’s most accessible way.  To get a good idea of what actually motivates the characters, of what any moment really means, you have to watch the entire film.  It’s set up like a mystery.  The mystery is, “How has Herman Mankiewicz come to this point, and why is he writing this particular screenplay?”  As with Citizen Kane, this movie is only saying something worthwhile if you care enough to become invested in it.  When I watched Citizen Kane, I didn’t really care.  But I feel more of an affinity for this protagonist and his story, possibly because I’m a writer myself.

Overall:
I plan to watch Mank again, and I hope it picks up some traction this awards season because I find its story and performances unusually compelling and its visuals and music quite well done, too.  This has been such a crazy year.  I haven’t been to a movie theater since March, and I find that watching in my bedroom makes it harder for me to get a sense of which films are good.  Maybe more the problem is that so few are good, or that there are just so few major new releases actually available to few.  But this is one of the better new movies I have seen this year, and it has convinced me to re-watch Citizen Kane.