“Mank” Reviewed David Fincher’s Impassioned Dive Into Hollywood Politics
The best thing about David Fincher’s new film, “Mank,” is that it isn’t about what one expects it to be about. More specifically, the movie (which is streaming on Netflix) is not about the assertion, made most strenuously by Pauline Kael in her controversial New Yorker piece “Raising Kane,” that Herman J. Mankiewicz, the veteran screenwriter, wrote the screenplay for “Citizen Kane” by himself and nearly had credit stolen from him by Orson Welles, the movie’s director, producer, star, and credited co-writer. Yes, that saga (which I revisited recently) is included in the film, but it is downplayed to the point of insignificance and near incomprehensibility. Rather, “Mank” is about why Mankiewicz wrote “Citizen Kane”—what experiences inspired him to write it and were essential to it, and why he was the only person who could have done so. The movie is not a “gotcha” movie, not a parroting of Kael’s argument, but, rather, an astutely probing and pain-filled work of speculative historical psychology—and a vision of Hollywood politics that shines a fervent plus ça change spotlight on current events. It is a film that left me with a peculiar impression—especially when I viewed it a second time, after brushing up on Mankiewicz’s story—that it is, in some ways, an inert cinematic object, lacking a dramatic spark. But its subject is fascinating, and its view of classic Hollywood is so personal, and passionately conflicted, that what takes place onscreen feels secondary to what it reveals of Fincher’s own directorial psychology—of his view of the business and the art of movies, and of his place in both. Like “Citizen Kane,” “Mank” is a movie built with flashbacks. Its present tense is 1940, when Mank (I’ll call the character Mank, as the film does, to distinguish him from the real-life person)—played by Gary Oldman—is deposited at a house (along with a huge clandestine stash of liquor) in a ranch compound in Victorville, California, about sixty miles from Los Angeles. Mank has been in a car accident and severely broken his leg. He’s in a half-body cast, and will be doing his screenwriting from bed. There with him is Welles’s collaborator John Houseman (Sam Troughton), to bounce ideas off of; a British secretary named Rita Alexander (Lily Collins), to take dictation, type the script, and, as it turns out, to spur him onward with insightful queries and responses; a German nurse named Frieda (Monika Gossmann), to care for Mank’s injuries; and, very occasionally, Welles himself (Tom Burke), who calls and drops by to consult. The mainspring of the cycle of flashbacks is a round of dictation that Mank delivers to Rita: she recognizes that the subject of the script he is formulating is the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst (played by Charles Dance), and her question to Mank—about the actress Marion Davies, Hearst’s (much younger) mistress—prompts a flashback to Mank’s first encounter with the mogul, in 1930.
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