There’s irony in the fact that the screenplay for Mank—which dramatizes Herman Mankiewicz’s struggle to complete the script for Citizen Kane—might be the movie’s weakest element.
Written in the late 1990s by Jack Fincher, the late father of Mank director David Fincher, the movie makes the famously puzzle-like script for Kane look like a conventional, three-act narrative. In quick, dizzying scenes full of rapid dialogue, Mank drops us into the main storyline—in which the alcoholic Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) tries to dry out in the desert while finishing the Kane script—then hops around to various flashbacks detailing his earlier years as a studio scribe and regular dinner guest of Kane inspiration William Randolph Hearst. (These forays are ostentatiously identified in onscreen script directions as “flashbacks,” lending a recurring meta touch.) “All in all it’s a bit of a jumble,” producer John Houseman (Sam Troughton) observes about an early draft of Kane. A jumble is certainly what we have here.
Viewers will likely struggle to keep up in the film’s early going, even if the names that race by—Houseman and Hearst, but also Louis B. Mayer, David O. Selznick, Irving Thalberg, Orson Welles, Marion Davies, and more—are familiar from film history. Most were to me, which is probably why I enjoyed Mank as much as I did. When it settles down, which is rare, the movie works as an exercise in cinephile time travel, immersing us in the cigars and stars of old Hollywood. (Helping set that mood is Erik Messerschmidt’s shimmering black-and-white cinematography, as well as the use of matte paintings and LED screens to mimic the classic-Hollywood technique of rear projection.)
Also interesting, especially given the election cycle we just survived, are the flashbacks involving the 1934 governor’s race between Republican Frank Merriam and novelist Upton Sinclair. A Sinclair supporter, Mankiewicz notices at one point that the voice in a pro-Merriam radio spot—claiming to be that of a voter scared of Sinclair’s socialist positions—actually belongs to an actress he’s worked with. It’s the 1930s equivalent of today’s Twitter bots, and especially intriguing to consider alongside Fincher’s 2010 film The Social Network.
As Mankiewicz, Oldman is refreshingly restrained, even if he does lean on the drunken-genius trope a bit too much. (This is amplified by the presence of two unfortunate women characters—a nurse and a typist—who exist only to position Mankiewicz as a boozy charmer.) Stronger performances come from Ferdinand Kingsley, who brings a cool, calculated sense of strategy to MGM exec Thalberg, and Tom Burke (so good in The Souvenir), who has booming fun in a few brief appearances as Orson Welles. Best of all is Amanda Seyfried, who is both witty and wide-eyed as silent-film star Marion Davies. Hearst’s kept companion on his vast estate, she’s trapped but not fully aware of it yet. (Hearst himself, played by Charles Dance, never quite registers as the existential threat Mank wants him to be.)
As Mank spirals outward, then circles back to the “present day” in the desert, it becomes clear that part of the problem with the film—and this is a problem of the screenplay—is that there is no center, nothing that the movie, when it’s done darting about, returns to as its thematic locus. As a cultural artifact, Citizen Kane itself remains largely on the sidelines. As a character study, Mankiewicz registers as something of a boozy cliche. As a political project, the film is erratic. At one point, a character jokes that a script being pitched is “director-proof.” Mank needed the opposite—a director who’s screenplay-proof. David Fincher proves to be close enough.
