Citizen Kane is considered by many to be the finest movie ever made, or at least the best American one. Orson Welles went to Hollywood with no cinematic experience and made a movie that he would never top on his first try, a movie that captivates even now as it explores what made Charles Foster Kane tick, a mystery that is maybe solved when someone carelessly tosses an old sled into a fire. Plenty of stories have been told about Welles and his efforts to even get the movie made, but despite its general acclaim today, the movie only earned one Academy Award, and that was for Best Screenplay, and Welles shared it with Herman J. Mankiewicz. But has anyone ever told Mankiewicz’s side of the story?
David Fincher’s father Jack actually wrote a screenplay on it, and the younger Fincher decided to make a movie out of his late father’s unproduced work, now on Netflix. And it’s a bit of a different thing for Fincher the director. Did it work?
Shot in black-and-white and made to look as much as possible like a more Golden Age of Hollywood movie, the film follows Herman “Mank” Mankiewicz as he writes his first draft for the screenplay that will become Citizen Kane. Gary Oldman plays Mank as a wisecracking alcoholic, dictating the script to a dutiful secretary (Lily Collins) while recovering from a broken leg, but then flashbacks show how Mank may have been inspired to write the movie in the first place, giving the audience something of an answer particularly since Mank seemed to be quite friendly with Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried), mistress to William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance). Why would Mank do it, particularly since his real beef seems to be with the overbearing Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard). Mayer has a special hatred for Democratic candidate for Governor of California Upton Sinclair (Bill Nye the Science Guy….no, really). And he’s going to use all his power in the studio to bring Sinclair down for the crime of being a dirty socialist.
You know, I know it’s standard for Republicans to accuse Democrats of being socialists, but Sinclair actually was a socialist, so that’s something else.
Now, to be honest, I didn’t realize until I saw a review afterwards that Mank follows the same pattern and storytelling style as Citizen Kane, intercutting Mank’s time writing the script and his encounters with the powerful while he was a Hollywood screenwriter. And, as much as I like David Fincher’s work overall, Fincher isn’t Orson Welles, and the it somewhat shows. The movie is held up largely by Oldman’s charismatic turn as Mank, a stubborn wiseass who spends most of the movie at least a little drunk and somewhat belligerent, but in a way that makes him seem more harmless than anything else. He’s the guy who will toss cutting remarks around during political discussions at parties for the rich and powerful, the very people who are blatantly manipulating the masses to vote in the wealthy’s favor and not, as Mank sees it, in their own.
That may be the biggest difference between Citizen Kane and Mank. Charles Forster Kane only briefly plays at looking out for the little guy briefly during his career running a newspaper, but really, he’s an egomaniac prone to temper tantrums. Mank is a lovable drunk who really does stand up for the little guy in his own, often ineffective, way. Mank can be insensitive, but he also possesses something Kane never had: empathy. Mank does try to do right by people, but he may not be personally equipped to actually do right by people (he’s not above borrowing a dollar from one man to loan a dollar to a destitute acquaintance). But despite all that, this somehow didn’t feel like a Fincher movie. He seemed to be mostly trying to copy an older style of filmmaking, and it just seems to do something I’ve never seen a Fincher movie do before: it dragged a bit. Oldman carries this movie, thanksfully, because without him, this is just a shadow of a movie considered the greatest of all time, and it somewhat shows.
Grade: B
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