Mank will be an inscrutable entry into the Best Picture academy field this year. Directed by David Fincher in his first feature film since 2014, this quirky dramedy stars Gary Oldman as Herman Mankiewicz, the smart-tongued screenwriter who pens the cinematic masterpiece Citizen Kane (1941).
To derive any enjoyment whatsoever from this movie, one has to be familiar with Citizen Kane, and even then, it’s not easy to keep up—either with the endlessly ironic Mank or with the screenplay’s many pivotal references to Hollywood history and lore.
Interpreting this chatty throwback is a doozy, but here goes. In summary, I view Mank is a kind of Marxist statement about the origins of art. The primary concern of the film seems to be Mank’s left-wing politics and the alienation they cause him in high up Hollywood circles. He irks studio executives with his irreverent disdain for their money-grubbing ways, and he pulls hard for liberal candidate Upton Sinclair, who ultimately loses the California governor’s race (thanks in part to Mank’s bosses)—all against a distant backdrop of rising fascism in Germany, which no one but Mank seems to be taking seriously.
It’s implied that Mank’s building animosity toward greedy bigwigs fuels his inspiration for Citizen Kane, the title character of which he bases on the curmudgeonly news tycoon William Randolph Hearst, greediest of them all. By extension, then, Mank the film argues that Citizen Kane is essentially a political reaction to a ruling elite increasingly detached from the reality of ordinary people at that time.
But is it just me, or this a pretty bad theory? For starters, Charles Foster Kane the character is actually written with great empathy, a far cry from the hard villain that Mank makes of Hearst. And the screenplay of Citizen Kane really just isn’t political in any way: it’s focused almost exclusively on the personal successes and failures of one man, with little attention paid to historical affairs. Fincher’s rendition of Herman Mankiewicz and the actual finished product of Citizen Kane just…don’t connect.
Nevertheless, when it’s all said and done, I have to admit the vision is interesting. I thought we had lost David Fincher the artist after big name adaptations like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) and Gone Girl (2014) started dominating his feature film oeuvre, but surprisingly, he’s come back swinging. He may be our foremost visual presenter of bitterness: among his sour creations are William Somerset from Se7en (1995), The Narrator from Fight Club (1999), Paul Avery from Zodiac (2007), the entire cast of The Social Network (2010), Lizbeth Salander from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Amy Dunne from Gone Girl; now we can add Herman Mankiewicz. Where there’s dissatisfaction and disappointment, there’s Fincher.
I don’t think he’s ever produced a masterpiece, and I don’t think Mank is one, but the technical attention to detail and genuine artistic interest of his latest entry, however flawed, makes me hold out hope that one day, he still might.
– Jim Andersen
For more reviews, see my praise of The Father.