Directed by: David Fincher
Starring: Gary Oldman, Amanda Seyfried, Arliss Howard, Lily Collins, Charles Dance
Rated R, 131 minutes
“You cannot capture a man’s entire life in two hours,” Herman Mankiewicz says in an early scene in “Mank.” “All you can hope is to leave the impression of one.” In the moment he’s describing his screenplay-in-progress for “Citizen Kane,” Orson Welles’ iconic masterpiece, but he could be talking about “Mank” itself. David Fincher’s (“The Social Network”) opus about the making of a magnum opus layers its fictional narratives and historical personalities to create a complicated portrait of a man at odds with others and himself. It’s riveting and sometimes disorienting. “The narrative is one big circle, like a cinnamon roll,” Mank admits.
“Mank” leans into these metafictional qualities, starting with the film’s look and sound, which painstakingly replicate the imperfections of early film technology, reminding us constantly of the medium’s pre-digital-era idiosyncrasies. Even the casting feels circular; Gary Oldman (“Darkest Hour”), now in his 60s, here plays a man two decades his junior, writing the script for the movie in which the famously young Orson Welles would play a man twice his own age.
“Citizen Kane,” the story of newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane’s rise and fall, told through flashbacks after Kane’s death, has long drawn power from its prophetic visions of tragic American hubris. “Mank” traces the origins of these visions, from the screenwriter’s interactions with the real-life publisher William Randolph Hearst, on whom Kane was based, to Mank’s pre-“Kane” Hollywood dealings. In one scene, while conjuring up a “Frankenstein” knockoff on the spot, Mank and his team of writers invent hacky plot details until they hit thematic pay dirt: “The ominous futility of man playing God,” says one; “The Faustian bargain of life everlasting,” says another; a third pontificates, “The triumph of the human spirit over the beast incarnate in our far-too-solid flesh.” The monster movie they’re pitching gets the boot, but Mank holds onto these bold promises, saving them for a picture that will make good on them.
Mank’s story also comes in flashbacks, sprinkled among scenes at the secluded ranch where he’s holed up to complete a draft of “Kane.” In flashbacks he schmoozes with studio heads and attends parties hosted by Hearst himself (Charles Dance, “Gosford Park”), enjoying Hearst’s good favor as the tycoon’s preferred conversational partner. But the flashbacks also trace Mank’s political evolution, as he comes to sympathize with a burgeoning socialist movement that the studios and Hearst spend good money to squash. These memories, spanning nearly a decade, illustrate how someone like Mank, constantly disheveled and usually hungover, dependent on the studios that bankroll his career and forgive his gambling debts, could find the resolve to write a script so critical of the power structures and manufactured celebrity that keep his world turning—in other words, how a cog could rebel against its own well-oiled machine.
Lest his story engage only with the political, “Mank” also allows generous space for the man’s personal relationships, with everyone from his brother to his long-suffering wife to Hearst’s live-in mistress, Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried, “Mamma Mia!”). Flirtatious but platonic, Mank and Marion navigate the changing landscapes of American politics and American movies, leaning on each other as gossip pals, drinking buddies, and intellectual sparring partners. Theirs is among the most intriguing and compelling onscreen friendships in recent memory, and Seyfried’s career-best performance gives the movie its brightest sheen.
As promised, Mank’s story gives the impression of a life. Despite a rambling quality to the storytelling, all the flashbacks and party chatter and drunken rants suggest a greater whole. They aren’t so much puzzle pieces forming a picture as they are interlocking shapes in an irregular tessellation, anchored by Mank the man and branching ever outward into the political, the social, and the ethical. “Mank” picks apart the life of a single artist, but it interrogates the responsibility of all artists to tell the truth, even (or especially) when it’s personally or politically inconvenient.
Arriving at a time when popular media has embraced the overtly political, after five years of reckoning with Donald Trump and #MeToo and everything in between, “Mank” feels ominously precise in its diagnosis. The timing is even more extraordinary, considering “Mank” was written by Jack Fincher, David Fincher’s father, who died in 2003. Eighty years removed from his greatest accomplishment, Mank’s visions are still as prophetic as ever.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 12/18/20.