David Fincher’s new film about the legendary screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz seems misconceived from the ground up. The problems begin with the very first shot. Fincher, a notorious perfectionist, decided to shoot this period piece in widescreen digital black-and-white — an inherently unappealing aesthetic choice that makes movies look like hastily applied Instagram filters. In an attempt to match the look of 35mm film, Fincher then added digital grain and fake reel change markers to his images. I’ve been trying to untangle the thought processes behind this bizarre visual strategy (as well as the supposedly period-accurate sound design) for months, and seeing all 130 minutes of Mank didn’t provide me with any clarity. It is a half measure — in trying to evoke the look and feel of a 30s Hollywood movie, it wildly misses the mark, offering neither the aesthetic pleasures of Hollywood’s golden age nor an incisive, modern commentary on those same pleasures. It is the worst of both worlds.
The script, which was first written by David Fincher’s father Jack in the 90s, puts Mank, a larger-than-life presence with an impressively rabble-rousing wit, into a series of scenes where he observes the corrupt intersection of show business and politics. To see the film tell it, Mank was inspired to write Citizen Kane by what he witnessed during the 1934 election, when the socialist novelist Upton Sinclair had a genuine shot at becoming California’s governor before William Randolph Hearst and Hollywood studio heads like Louis B. Mayer flexed their muscle. Most damningly, MGM’s Irving B. Thalberg used “the magic of the movies” to produce a series of persuasive, falsehood-laden attack ads against Sinclair.
As a piece of historical fiction, Mank often feels like one of Ryan Murphy’s Hollywood-based limited series, clumsily introducing all of these fascinating Hollywood figures and reducing them to flat, corny caricatures (I recoiled at an early scene where Mank and his legendary screenwriting buddies pitch bad ideas to one of the all-time great cinematic artists, “Joe von Sternberg”). But the movie comes alive when it’s specifically about Mank wrestling with his place in the corrupt studio system. Through his weary face and increasingly defeated presence, Gary Oldman’s performance does a great job of showing Mank’s sarcastic detachment from Hollywood (In real life, Mank encouraged his writer friends to work in Hollywood by saying “Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots”), as well as his futile attempts to change the minds of his fellow dinner party attendees. Fincher’s film suggests that in writing Citizen Kane (or American, as Mankiewicz’s first draft was titled), Mank was atoning for his complicity in Hollywood’s sins.
Many critics have rushed to condemn the film’s distortions about the authorship of Citizen Kane, and I agree with the sentiment. The most puzzling thing about Mank is that the aspersions it casts on Orson Welles are ultimately irrelevant to the film’s more interesting narrative threads. For most of the movie, Welles is in the background as a friendly collaborator, albeit also an unconventional one. But after Mank has finished writing his masterpiece, Welles turns into a one-dimensional villain, and the movie’s final moments suggest that Welles’ career skyrocketed while Mank was left to languish in obscurity and die an early death. But the conflict between Mank and Welles is an entirely different beast than the conflicts between Mank and Hearst, Mayer, et al that dominate the rest of the film, particularly when Mank did end up receiving a screen credit (and an Oscar win) for Citizen Kane. Consequently, even as a fabrication of real life, the movie’s climactic moments fall dramatically flat.
There are entertaining scenes throughout Mank, particularly those where Mank navigates the stranger aspects of the studio system and causes trouble at various social gatherings with his barbed wit. There are also some great moments between Mank and Marion Davies (played by Amanda Seyfried, whose performance is very likable if not wholly accurate), two kindred spirits torn between matters of the heart and of the mind. But Mank is also sloppy in ways that go against Fincher’s reputation for hyper-precise filmmaking. The flashback structure is especially laborious, with scenes of Mank laid up in bed trying to write proving rather dull. Unsure whether to be sentimental and nostalgic, or cold and critical, Fincher aims for both and doesn’t manage either.