Butler's Cinema Scene

Amanda Seyfried as Marion Davies, Gary Oldman as Herman Mankiewicz

“MANK” My rating: A-

131 minutes | MPAA rating: R

David Fincher’s “Mank” is both a work of genius and a foolhardy gamble, a backstage-Hollywood epic that, for maximum effectiveness, requires its audience to be intimately familiar with Orson Welles’  “Citizen Kane.”

Great. I watch “Kane” a couple of times a year; I’ve even played it on slo-mo so as to appreciate every little nuance of its visual splendor (though one needs to set aside a full 12 hours for that act of devotion).

But I’m not sure how your average 2020 moviegoer is going to react to Fincher’s effort, since “Mank” is literally crammed to the gills with visual, aural and thematic references to “Kane.”

For this viewer, at least, it is two hours of cinematic heaven.

As presented in the screenplay by Fincher’s late father, Jack Fincher, “Mank” is not about the filming of “Citizen Kane” or about the controversy generated by the finished film. (In fact, I’m not sure the words “Citizen Kane” are even uttered here until the last five minutes.)

Rather it centers on the writing of the screenplay in 1940. Orson Welles, the boy wonder director of “Kane” (Tom Burke, who sounds like Welles even if he doesn’t much look like him), is here little more than a walk-on character.

The film’s “hero” is Herman Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman), a Hollywood screenwriter who has worn out his welcome at the studios thanks to his boozing and bitterly dismissive attitude toward Tinseltown’s power structure.

As played by Oldman, Mank is adept at wrapping his verbal poison pills in the soothing charm of a born  ranconteur. He’s just this short of being openly contemptuous of his studio bosses, but even they cannot hate him.

Although he is a miserable SOB, there’s something about Mank that inspires devotion and loyalty. His wife (Tuppence Middleton) — known universally as “Poor Sara” —  wearily cleans up after his boozing and insane gambling habit.

Now Mank’s been hired by Welles — the wiz kid’s been given carte blanche by RKO to make his first movie — to come up with a screenplay about a newspaper tycoon inspired by real-life media mogul William Randolph Hearst.  Mank, nursing a broken leg, has been installed in a bungalow in remote Victorville CA, far away from temptation.

He’s accompanied by producer John Houseman (Sam Troughton), who is to edit his daily pages, and by a somewhat stiff British lady (Lily Collins) who is expected to see to his physical care and keep him off the sauce…although before long he’s made her his collaborator in mischief.

Arliss Howard as Louis B. Mayer, Charles Dance as William Randolph Hearst

The bulk of “Mank” unfolds in flashbacks covering the decade leading up to “Kane.”

We’re treated to a bull session in an M-G-M writer’s room populated by verbose wits like George S. Kaufman, Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht. (Those names mean nothing to most people.  For Hollywood history geeks, though, it’s like taking a meet-and-greet on Mount Olympus.)

We have encounters with cannily manipulative studio boss Louis B. Mayer (Independence native Arliss Howard) and producing legends like Irving Thalberg (Ferdinand Kingsley) and David O. Selznick (Toby Leonard Moore).

We travel with Mank as a guest at San Simeon, the palatial hilltop estate overlooking the Pacific constructed by Hearst (Charles Dance, less raging tyrant than bemused liege lord). There he finds a kindred spirit in Hearst’s mistress, movie actress Marion Davies (a sweetly heartbreaking Amanda Seyfried).

Near the end of the film there’s a marvelously skin-crawling scene in which a drunken Mank arrives late at a Hearst costume party, proceeds to insult his host for his political brutality and tops it off by puking on the dining hall parquet. For this he is banned from the premises.

He’ll get his revenge by writing “Kane”; alas, in the process Mank will betray Davies, using her as the model for Kane’s drunken, talentless “singer” wife (an act of cruelty about which Welles later admitted he felt no little guilt).

“Mank” adds an extra fillip to the tale by taking a digression into the 1934 California gubernatorial run by socialist novelist (The Jungle) Upton Sinclair (played by none other than Bill Nye the Science Guy). Mank discovers that the studio chiefs, fearful of a lefty running the state, have cooked up a massive disinformation campaign, churning out staged newsreels in which well-groomed white “voters” voice their support of the Republican candidate while dark-skinned and foreigner types openly embrace Sinclair.

When Mank finds that Hearst has personally financed these early examples of “fake” news it stirs the embers of revenge that will flicker into flame with “Kane.” (Apparently this particular detail was created by Jack Fincher; there’s no historical basis for it.  Yet narratively it is a stroke of genius, offering the perfect explanation for Mank’s anti-Hearst hostility.)

With its time-jumping narrative “Mank” lacks anything like an easily digested through line.  It’s more of a personality study set within an elaborate recreation of Old Hollywood.

On that level, though, it works beautifully.

Technically the movie’s a marvel, with Erik Messerschmidt’s black-and-white cinematography absolutely nailing the look of a classic studio picture (even to the point of flashing cue blips on the image to notify the projectionist of an upcoming reel change).  There are entire scenes (especially those featuring Mank and Marion) in which the dialogue rings with just a hint of echo, perfectly evoking the aural ambience of an old-style soundstage.

The costuming and sets are little short of perfect; a scene in which Mank and Marion wander through Hearst’s private zoo is almost too visually splendid to take in.

For that matter, “Mank” should hold up under repeated viewings.  I’m sure there are tons of “tells” scattered throughout that I missed upon first viewing.  Which is very much the same sort of experience one encounters with “Citizen Kane.”

Both movies are gifts that keep on giving.

| Robert W. Butler