Review by Logan Kenny
David Fincher’s Mank is an enigma. It is a work based on the writing of the most critically acclaimed film in history Citizen Kane, a testament to the genius of its masterful lead writer Herman J. Mankiewicz, and a bitter subversion of the expectations and politics of the Hollywood studio system. It is also frighteningly messy, occasionally deranged, and goes against all the expectations that a film with this premise and this director seemed to set up. Mank is a film that frequently soaks itself in booze stains and nihilistic prophesying, alters conventional historical reports of his relationship with Orson Welles, and has managed to piss off the majority of the people who’ve seen it in some way or another. It is a messy, almost malignant tribute to the broken profiteering racket of the classic film industry and all the backstabbing, melancholy and destruction that comes with any form of success in its waters.
Mank focuses very little on the workings of Mank as a writer or Kane as a text. In the sequences devoted to Mank’s penmanship, where he’s assisted by a wonderful Lily Collins in getting the script produced for the harsh deadline, there’s little attention given to the nuances of the dialogue or how audacious the structural decisions were. We don’t witness Mank, trapped in his motel bed suffering from his lack of alcohol consumption, agonising over how to cut down his magnum opus or how to perfectly illustrate the thematics he’s aiming for as an artist. Instead, there are a few sequences of him and Collins verbally sparring and a couple of discussions between Mank and Orson Welles’s middle man about the density of the script. Mank is only about Citizen Kane as a basic framework – a surface-level ploy to get audiences and studios in the door. Instead, it’s a work about the nature of filmmaking itself, of using art as a way to influence and define historical perspectives and propagandistic arguments.
So much of the film takes place through flashbacks, showing Mank’s journey through the Great Depression-era of Hollywood opulence, watching as he drunkenly stumbles onto elaborate film sets and gorgeous manors dripping with decadence. The film is sadistic and bitter towards the studio heads and corporate stooges who manipulate the medium and the workers involved in producing it in order to satisfy their own interests. The film spotlights the the disingenuous speeches of the MGM CEO as he waxes about everyone being in it together as he slashes their wages, showing the spineless bastard who uses cinematic language and the platform of the theatre to run propaganda campaigns against a socialist candidate, depicting momentary hope for the working people through passionate rallies on the street even with the knowledge that the upper classes will sabotage those dreams for a better life. This is the concrete narrative of Mank, a film that suggests that the utilisation of radio and film is primarily about manipulation, whether that’s something as wonderful as believing in the monster King Kong or something more ideologically insidious. It shows how the magic of cinema can and has been poisoned with right-wing capitalist interest and how those threads of propaganda exist in the studio productions today. This willingness to explore the manipulation of perspective through celluloid continues over to its own text. It’s strange to see a large majority of Mank’s detractors lambast it for its portrayal of Orson Welles as ahistorical and disingenuous when so much of the film’s explicit text is about the lack of trust in images’ integrity. It is using images to push an idea of an agenda, but throughout the winding narrative threads and incoherent drunkard rambles, the agenda becomes more and more faded and all we are left with are little fragments of who and what Mank might have been.
As the film progresses, it gets more drenched in melancholy and less tied down to any specific threads. Gary Oldman’s portrayal of Mank becomes more husk than man as he drunkenly quotes Don Quixote and flashes through years of his life at a time. The more of the fictional elements of history it embraces – and the more sensation it gets out of Mank’s alcoholism – the bleaker it gets. He loses his friend to suicide after desperately clamouring through the night to save him, he fails to stop the propaganda being released to theatres across the country, he fails to truly make a name for himself beyond being the popular drunk at William Randolph Hearst’s dinner parties and even his loving wife Sara recognises how much the drink has taken from him. On his quest for any recognition, he abandons his family for months writing the Citizen Kane script, a script that lambasts and satirises people who he has formed major connections with over the years. Amanda Seyfried’s portrait of Marion Davies, the inspiration for the notorious wife character in Citizen Kane, is wonderfully astute and captures a lot of the film’s woozy sadness with just a few scenes. Her final confrontation with Mank, a simple picnic where they talk about the script, aches with a million words not said and a forced smile of forgiveness. You can feel the finality of their encounter, the knowledge beneath both of their pleasantries that all of the beautiful moments they’ve had over the years are coming to an end, that once this day in the sunlight reaches its end, time will move on past their connection and they will become distant strangers.
In addition, the way Fincher portrays William Randolph Hearst is almost as bleak as the portrait of Mank himself. There are bleak parallels between the two men in their final moments together, drunkenly stumbling through dark corridors, saying words with passionate fervour and linguistic accomplishment that ultimately mean very little to either of them. In the present of Mank’s universe, Hearst is losing his fortune and Mank is losing his grasp on himself. They are two sides of the same coin – desperate men who can’t help but sink themselves into a bottomless pit – and it’s fitting that their final moments together are so nightmarish and incomplete. The only real optimism to be found in the film is through Lily Collins’ character Rita who spends the entirety of the film waiting for news from her husband, a fighter pilot missing in action. It’s fitting that her embrace of good news, her magnificent moment of hope and joy of finding out that her person is still alive comes in between the two most controversial and depressing sequences of the film surrounding Mank himself. Right after the most naked and confrontational moment of challenging historical perspective (in which Orson Welles becomes a blunt caricature designed to reaffirm Mank’s genius), there is a moment of sublime beauty and hope. There might not be the chance to save him, but there’s the ability to highlight the good and beauty in the world, even in the midst of parasitic darkness.
While history can be altered in perspective, it can’t change the concrete facts: it can’t bring a man back to life. Mank’s destiny is to die from the effects that alcoholism caused on his body. Even in this film all about him, seemingly a celebration and tribute to an unsung writing genius, the only real recognition he gets is a falsified Oscar speech where Oldman performs the words that Mankiewicz might have said if he was able to make that speech on stage. The words are grandiose, like most of the verbiage in the screenplay, but they are hollow and filled with hurt and desperate longing. He insults Welles’s lack of involvement, praises himself, etc, but there is nothing real here. By the closing seconds of the speech, the most artificial moment of the whole production, the closing text appears on screen over a faded freeze frame, text describing how he died 11 years later at the age of 55 without any future with Welles. Even in this moment of posthumous celebration, there is the reminder that it doesn’t change anything. It’s clear that the last two scenes are not to be taken as implicit arguments for Mank being the only genius behind Citizen Kane, but as a subjective exploration of the bitterness and tragedy that this man had throughout his life. The film knows it’s full of shit – at least a little bit – but in being so, it captures this illusive and heartbreaking truth of being alive. Through fiction and through the artifice of image, it captures a bleakness of being forgotten and a desperation to make your demons worth something more effectively than it’s getting credit for. It’s a dark film, filled with a lot of bitter humour and moments without clarity, but it’s one of the 2020 releases that will stick around in my mind for years to come. Whether its own legacy is one of failure or one of brilliance is something that will only become clear with time.