‘Mank' is a Playful, Technically Marvelous, But Slight Affair [Review]

David Fincher’s “Mank” will not be a movie with very much mass appeal. It will, however, adhere to the tastes of the producers in the Academy voting body who’ve always had a nostalgic yearning for the Golden-Age milieu depicted in Fincher’s film. This is a very dry, dialogue-driven ode to a bygone era of industry guys wheeling and dealing behind the scenes. A passion project, if you will, shot in black and white, and semi-inspired by the making of “Citizen Kane,” “Mank” chronicles a forgotten era of Hollywood lore, all seen through the eyes of its misunderstood screenwriter, Herman J. Mankiewicz.

The film clearly wants to show the parallels Mankiewicz saw between media mogul Randolph William Hearst (an excellent Charles Dance) and Charles Foster Kane. Not to mention Hearst’s consigliere, and MGM head honcho, Louis B. Meyer, and Kane’s similarly dutiful “helper,” Everett Sloane Bernstein. There’s also Amanda Seyfried, playing Hearst’s younger lover Marion Davies, who befriended Mank, the Hollywood screenwriter, in the 1930s as she was getting closer to the inner circle of media mogul Hearst. She would ultimately be the inspiration for Kane’s wife Susan Alexander. Then there’s the case of San Simeon, Hearst’s multi-million dollar mansion, filled with its own zoo no less, and the inspiration for Kane’s hollow and unfinished Xanadu kingdom.

Detractors of Pauline Kael’s famous essay, “Raising Kane,” will not be happy with Fincher’s take on who deserved the screenplay credit for “Citizen Kane”. In that 1971 essay, Kael reignited controversy over the authorship of the screenplay, co-credited to Mank and Welles, for the 1941 classic. The essay, which made the claim that Mank was the main writer of the screenplay as Welles stood on the creative sidelines, was later discredited by some scholars, after Welles’ contributions to the screenplay were documented and Kael’s own evidence was called into question. And yet, Fincher, adapting the rather dated screenplay his late father Jack wrote in 1993, unequivocally sides with Mankiewicz.

Gary Oldman is the standout here, showing the debilitating alcoholism, even drunkard Scott Fitzgerald called Mank a “ruined man” that would eventually destroy Mank’s career and the unadorned socialist politics that would blacklist him as well. On a purely technical level, “Mank” is a total triumph — the period details are really just second-to-none. The film is beautifully shot by Erik Messerschmidt, his black and white photography using a lot of natural lighting, making you just want to soak up every frame in this film.

I’ll be watching this film again before giving out a final verdict, but this is a film that does speak to a very niche audience of cinephiles. The film’s restraint did distance a little too much for me to truly love the whole thing, but my admiration for the sheer craft of this picture is very high. The flashback-flash forward narrative trickery is an ode to Kane’s groundbreaking storytelling techniques, but for all the “Kane” references, “Mank” turns out to not so much be about Welles’ masterpiece as much as it is portraying a shape-shifting time in Hollywood, when the great depression and economic recession was coming to an end and the big studios were wondering how to push the industry forward during those unpredictable times. Sound familiar? [B]