Crank N' Mank Month/The Fractured Mirror 2.0 #1 Mank (2020)

Orson Welles occupies an outsized place of prominence in film as the star, director and co-writer of Citizen Kane and various lesser masterpieces but also as an idea and an ideal: the ultimate artist and showman, an incomparable genius too pure for our corrupt and compromised world and the dirty, mercenary business of movie-making. 

We’re in love with Welles as film’s ultimate tragic hero, a towering giant who made the greatest movie of all time at the impossibly tender age of 25 and was cursed to suffer forever in the cold, lonely, never-ending shadow of his magnum opus, a movie so revered that it has become shorthand for unsurpassable cinematic genius. 

David Fincher’s Mank, which he directed from a script by his father Jack, who died in 2003, audaciously reduces Welles to a secondary figure in both the narrative and in the making of Citizen Kane so that it can focus on what it sees as the real genius behind the nine-time Oscar nominee: co-screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman), who controversially shared the Best Original Screenplay Oscar that was the film’s only win at the fourteenth Academy Awards. 

In Mank’s revisionist telling, its boozy, bleary but righteous hero is everything Welles is supposed to be: a genius and hero whose integrity and ethics made him the odd man out in a studio system built on blind obedience and conformity and more pointedly, the true father and creator of Citizen Kane. 

Mank suggests that its dashing hero is the only man in the history of the universe capable of making Orson Welles seem dull and dim-witted by comparison. Mank is an unabashed, unashamed exercise in myth-making and pop culture mythologizing that replaces the cult of Orson Welles with the sacred Church of Herman Mankiewicz. 

Fincher’s movie doesn’t just argue aggressively for its protagonist as the real genius behind Citizen Kane; it depicts him as a perfect combination of Oskar Schindler and Oscar Wilde. Like Oskar Schindler, the casually heroic Mankiewicz uses his power and position to save the lives of Europeans who would otherwise be slaughtered in concentration camps. Like Oscar Wilde, Mank is the funniest, smartest human being alive, someone whose every bon mot, witticism and aphorism angrily demands to be preserved for the sake of posterity. 

Fincher puzzlingly casts the sixty-two year old Gary Oldman as Mankiewicz, a man who died of alcoholism-related causes at fifty-five in 1953, twelve years after the release of Citizen Kane.

Since Mank follows its protagonist over the course of a decade or so, beginning with his arrival in Hollywood in 1930, that means that Oldman spends the entire film playing a character anywhere from twenty to thirty or so years younger than the actor playing him. 

Fincher and Oldman justify this peculiar choice by presenting their wisecracking, booze-swilling hero as someone who took such terrible care of himself and abused his body and mind with alcohol, excessive gambling, overwork, stress and bold and brazen risks to such an extent that he looked anywhere from twenty to thirty years older than he actually was. 

Doesn’t look a day over 90!

Hard living ages a person and Mank establishes that its titular wordsmith was as self-destructive as he was almost inconceivably brilliant and funny. When you possess the world’s most beautiful mind, does it really matter what you look like? In Mank, slovenliness is next to godliness. Mankiewicz is so revered, even by his cynical fellow ink-stained scribes, that he can dress, stagger, slur and smell like a hobo and still be treated as a man of distinction by captains of industry. 

Mank begins in 1940, with its hard-working, hard-living hero recovering from a car accident and a solid decade of self-abuse, primarily with liquor and gambling. His body is battered, bruised and just barely functional but his mind and his imagination are alive with energy and inspiration for his latest and ultimately greatest gig: writing a screenplay for hotshot wunderkind Orson Welles.

When he came to Hollywood, Welles had the heat and the power to demand complete creative control on his first movie despite being a mere twenty-four years old. That control extended to his choice of collaborator when it came to writing the script. The popular radio performer and daring theatrical impresario had the wisdom to choose Mankiewicz to write the screenplay that would catapult him to cinematic immortality but with the condition that the veteran screenwriter’s work not be credited. 

As an old hand in Hollywood, Mankiewicz is no stranger to others getting credit for his brilliance. Such is the existential lot of a script doctor but as he plunges deeper and deeper into the impossibly rich, complicated world of Citizen Kane and by extension, William Randolph Hearst’s life and loves, he begins to sense that this screenplay is different, deeper, more important. To put things in Boogie Nights terms, it’s the one he will be remembered for. Because Mank is thick with hokey historical irony Mankiewicz is of course right or we wouldn’t be watching a movie about it from one of the top filmmakers of our time. 

The structure of Jack Fincher’s relentlessly, even excessively clever screenplay is forever hopping back and forth in time through copious flashbacks to chronicle how Mankiewicz made his name in Hollywood in the 1930s as the wittiest wag ever to sit down for dinner and way too many drinks at the Algonquin Round Table and a much sought after screenwriter and script doctor. 

Within the world of MGM and William Randolph Hearst, Mankiewicz functioned as something of a drunken, debauched jester. Like a jester in olden times, Mankiewicz used humor, irony and metaphor to expose painful truths about the kings of his day, movie moguls like Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg and impossibly powerful press titans like Hearst. 

As a consummate insider and outsider, Mankiewicz could see the outsized private flaws in these men as well as their public virtues. He saw them as human rather than all-powerful Gods, something the very powerful found both honorable and threatening. Mank depicts Mankiewicz as fearless to a self-defeating degree, as someone who would rather be right, and suffer terribly, than compromise for the sake of his own happiness and success.

In turning the larger than life legend of his onetime friend and benefactor William Randolph Hearst into the screenplay for Citizen Kane, Mankiewicz simultaneously betrayed him in a deeply personal and painful manner and elevated the messy rough clay of the newspaper mogul’s life into the stuff of great, enduring art. 

Hearst and ally Louis B. Mayer wanted to bury Citizen Kane for the sake of Hearst’s reputation and legacy. Instead it became one of our most endlessly dissected and celebrated works of art and entertainment. In Mank, the screenplay for Citizen Kane represents a form of symbolic patricide with strong Oedipal connotations that involve Mankiewicz’s amorous feelings for William Randolph Hearst’s bewitching mistress Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried), a tough, smart and funny New York dame who has chosen to live a life inside Hearst’s (Charles Dance) golden cage out of a combination of calculation and genuine adoration. Seydfried captures the tricky mix of vulnerability, humor and strength at Davies’ core even if it is distracting to see a 35 year old actress like Seyfried play a character born the exact same year (1897) as the one played by the 62 year old Oldman. 

The deeply principled, and consequently perpetually aghast Mankiewicz sees Kane as his way of speaking truth to power not just about William Randolph Hearst but also Louis B. Mayer, Irving Thalberg and every other hypocritical, Conservative father figure who masqueraded as kindly, benevolent patriarchs responsibly overseeing their businesses with an eye towards serving the public good but conducted themselves with ruthless, brutal, unsentimental calculation behind the scenes. 

Mankiewicz was an idealist as well as a cynic, so there was a part of him that felt deep empathy for the men they wanted to be, and perhaps once were, as well as righteous anger at what they had allowed themselves to become. That sympathy, anger and ambivalence all made their way into his screenplay for Citizen Kane. 

Mank is a film of glittering, magnificent surfaces, a visually dazzling, gorgeously shot immersion in the wonder and terror of yesteryear and Hollywood history that oftentimes does not seem to have a whole lot going on underneath. Mank is a cinephile’s delight that unfortunately doesn’t hold up to too much scrutiny. It’s the kind of well-made but fundamentally shallow comic melodrama that becomes less satisfying the more you think about it. 

Mank is a spectacularly entertaining motion picture. You wouldn’t expect anything less from a master like David Fincher. But it’s certainly no Citizen Kane.

Pre-order The Joy of Trash, the Happy Place’s upcoming book about the very best of the very worst and get instant access to all of the original pieces I’m writing for them AS I write them (there are NINE so far, including Shasta McNasty and the first and second seasons of Baywatch Nights) AND, as a bonus, monthly write-ups of the first season Baywatch Nights you can’t get anywhere else (other than my Patreon feed) at https://the-joy-of-trash.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

and of course you can buy The Weird Accordion to Al AND The Weird A-Coloring to Al here: https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or from those monsters over at Amazon here

AND of course you can also pledge to this site and help keep the lights on at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace