2021 Oscars Review: Mank
Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried, left) and Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman, right). Seyfried is nominated for Best Supporting Actress and Oldman is nominated for Best Actor at the 93rd Academy Awards.
Tom is back with another review of a Best Picture nominee: David Fincher’s Mank. Mank is nominated for ten Academy Awards including Best Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actress, and Cinematography. It stars Gary Oldman as Herman J. Mankiewicz, in a non-chronological timeline, as he interacts with 1930s Hollywood society and develops inspiration to write the screenplay for Citizen Kane. There are some spoilers here, and a brief bit for Kane as well. The film is available on Netflix.
“You cannot capture a man’s entire life in two hours. All you can hope is to leave the impression of one.”
Unless you live under a rock, you know that Citizen Kane is considered by many to be one of, if not the greatest movie of all time. And if you know about Citizen Kane, you probably know two things: 1) Orson Welles directed, wrote, produced, and starred in it; and 2) the subject of the film, Charles Foster Kane, is a fictional character based upon a variety of media barons of the early 1900s including William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. What has been lost to time, however, is the feud between Welles (Tom Burke) and the film’s true screenwriter, Herman J. “Mank” Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman), as well as Mank’s ability to ruffle feathers among and draw inspiration from the corrupt Hollywood elite of the 1930s.
Let me preface my review by saying this straightaway: I think it’s awesome that David Fincher (one of my favorite directors: Se7en, The Social Network, Gone Girl, the music videos for Madonna’s “Vogue” and “Express Yourself”) was finally able to direct a film that his late father, Jack, wrote and failed to have picked up by a studio in the 1990s. It’s a beautiful thing for a son to be able to take his father’s words and ideas from the atmosphere and turn them into tangible images for the world in a way his father would have wanted. I say that last part because when Jack tried to make the film in the '90s, the studio apparently “balked over [Jack] Fincher’s insistence that the story needed to be shot in black and white as a nod to Gregg Toland’s expressionist cinematography in Citizen Kane.”
So it’s great that his son David was able to get his whole usual gang together (including Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for the score), and make his dad’s passion project, in black-and-white, for today’s audience. In fact, after working with Fincher on Mindhunter, a Netflix vice president stated that they “didn’t have any anxiety about making [Mank] . . . [b]ecause it’s David Fincher. He’s one of the best there is, and we knew how long he’d worked on it and thought about it, as well as how personal a project it was to him. That excited us.”
That being said, in execution, the film screamed Oscar bait. I mean, come on: a movie loaded with references to Old Hollywood, filmed in black-and-white, about Citizen Kane, and starring Gary Oldman as a wise-cracking alcoholic screenwriter, from a twice-nominated director? The Academy is literally the exact, precise audience for this movie. It screams “awards please.”
That’s not a bad thing in itself though, because I think the movie contains a lot of merit. Oldman is at his best and is one of a handful of actors who could have elevated this movie with his biting wit and sarcasm. Reznor and Ross show that they can craft an engaging score that isn’t loaded to the brim with intense synth. Seyfried brings nuance and sympathy to a character that could have been a one-note stereotype. My guy Charles Dance (Game of Thrones, The Crown) gets to chew on scenes like only he can as William Randolph Hearst. Bill Nye (Bill Nye the Science Guy, Bill Nye: Science Guy, Bill Nye Saves the World) appears as journalist, author of everyone’s favorite pig-slaughtering novel The Jungle, and California gubernatorial candidate Upton Sinclair (yes, that’s a real sentence). The direction and cinematography are on point. There’s a lot to like about this movie!
One particular plot point that interested me is the gubernatorial race between socialist Democratic candidate Sinclair and Republican Frank Merriam (not the dictionary guy). While on the surface it only tangentially relates to Mank’s screenwriting, it eventually influences much of the inspiration for Citizen Kane. The viewer takes in the political issues in back rooms as Hearst, Louis B. Mayer (yes, the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer guy, played by Arliss Howard), Irving Thalberg (Ferdinand Kingsley, which might just be a fake name made up by Wikipedia) and other media and film bigwigs espouse their fears of socialism’s existential threat.
A slight detour for some background: Sinclair ran on the so-called EPIC (End Poverty In California) platform, which would have implemented a wealth tax, provided near-universal pensions, and allowed the government to seize unused farmland and factories to provide work for the unemployed. His campaign represented a threat to California elite like Hearst and Mayer and the rest of the established uber-capitalist order. In the film, Mayer summarizes his cynicism and condescension toward the common working class consumer, and relatedly, shows the greed of the economically elite, thusly: “[The film industry] is a business where the buyer gets nothing for his money but a memory. What he bought still belongs to the man who sold it. That’s the real magic of the movies.” As such, clearly Mayer and those of his ilk did not want a socialist like Sinclair repurposing their wealth to level the playing field for the working and impoverished classes.
In response to Sinclair’s campaign, Hearst and Mayer, among others, preyed on California workers’ fear that unemployed people from outside the state would immigrate and take what was left of the dearth of employment during the Great Depression. They pooled their vast, incredible resources and conspired to create fake, scripted newsreels with actors portraying common, working class people espousing their support for Merriam and fear of socialism, communism, and Sinclair.
The 1934 California gubernatorial election is often described as the first time that the media engaged in a smear campaign against a political candidate using inaccurate news stories, but I think if you’ve followed me this far through this spiel about politics and early twentieth century history, you know that it certainly wasn’t the last. In fact, the parallels to today’s political climate were numerous: conservative media used fake news to swing public opinion in a highly publicized election where the Democratic candidate was branded as too far left by tapping into unfounded fear in the working class about immigrants taking jobs. As Mank states in the film:
If you keep telling people something untrue, loud and long enough, they’re apt to believe it.
And that’s all I’ll say about that.
In opposition with his then-boss and Hearst, Mank identifies with Sinclair and feels uncomfortable with the fake newsreels. This episode in 1934 inspires him, in 1940, to accept Welles’ offer to ghostwrite the Kane screenplay for RKO Pictures. Mank, with Hearst in mind, goes on to create the iconic character of Charles Foster Kane, a power-hungry media mogul who manipulated public opinion about political issues, tries to make his untalented actress wife into a Hollywood star, and dies miserable and alone (oh it’s in like the first scene, it’s not a spoiler, relax - and it was released in 1942, I think the statute of limitations on spoilers has run out). According to Mank, Citizen Kane is basically the most thorough and brutal diss track ever written.
As you can see, I’m fascinated by the ideas behind this aspect of the story. But the movie overall didn’t necessarily do it for me outside of the final half hour, which features a venomous soliloquy from a drunken Mank at a party at Hearst Castle (a real thing, and the inspiration for Kane’s Xanadu) in 1937 in which he eviscerates Hearst, Mayer, and Marion Davies with his description of the Kane screenplay he’s about to write. There’s a whole lot more going on, including Mank’s functional alcoholism, his flirtatious friendship with Davies, and Welles’ being an intolerable megalomaniac. Some of it works, some of it doesn’t. I think the film’s decision to jump back and forth from 1934ish to 1940 is slightly disorienting and doesn’t add much to the story besides a structural homage to Kane.
Another thing that bothers me is the flirtation between Mank and Davies. I’m not here to shame about the 27-year age difference between Oldman (62) and Seyfried (35), especially since that’s very Hollywood, but in real life, Mank and Davies were…the same age. Although both performers play their roles to perfection, it just adds a weird power dynamic that kind of took me out of the movie. That power dynamic is both inaccurate and not how Mank is portrayed to that point. Conversely, Davies was 34 years younger than her partner and benefactor Hearst in real life, and Seyfried is about 40 years younger than Charles Dance, so that age difference makes a whole lot of sense within the construct of the film and supports their characterization.
Finally, a meta observation I made deals with the Academy Awards themselves. In the movie, Mank eventually fights for his right to be credited as the screenwriter for Kane. As he tells Welles: “I want credit. It’s the best thing I’ve ever written.” This triggers Welles into an angry outburst that Mank writes into the film. At the 14th Academy Awards in 1942, Citizen Kane was nominated for nine prizes, including Best Picture, Actor (Welles), and Director (Welles). It failed to capture a statue in any category except for one: Best Original Screenplay, credited to Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles.
In a cruel ironic twist, Mank is nominated for ten awards at the upcoming ceremony, one more than its subject. However, it is up for basically everything except for Best Original Screenplay. I actually thought that much of the screenplay was extremely sharp and one of the best parts of the movie, so that was a little surprising to me.
Overall, Mank is a dry, witty, alcohol-fueled dive into Depression-era Hollywood bolstered by strong performances from Oldman, Seyfried, and Dance in particular. It also wades into some compelling ideas that could have been explored more thoroughly in a different movie. But its somewhat meandering pacing and disorienting structure, coupled with its 131-minute runtime, make it drag a bit too much for me to put it in my upper echelon of Best Picture nominees.
Rating: 7/10