Mank: A true dazzler

Mank (2020) • View trailer

Five stars. Rated R, for profanity and sexual candor

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.8.21

Director David Fincher’s Mank is a magnificent experience in all manner of ways, starting with Gary Oldman’s mesmerizing portrayal of celebrated journalist, author and screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz.

 

Screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) and actress Marion Davies
(Amanda Seyfried) meet over a shared cigarette; they'll soon bond over their
tempestuous fealty to William Randolph Hearst.

It’s also a bravura, often breathtaking display of cinematic art. Fincher, cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt and editor Kirk Baxter have meticulously replicated the style, atmosphere and very essence of the film — Citizen Kane — whose creation drives this narrative. The sharply sculpted screenplay — by Fincher’s late father, Jack — even mimics the non-linear storytelling style that was so innovative in Orson Welles’ classic.

 

The saga is rigorously period-authentic, and (mostly) historically accurate. Jack Fincher conflates a few key events — and meddles a bit with chronology — to heighten dramatic tension, but his characterization of key players is (often dismayingly) dead-on.

 

Perhaps Jack Fincher’s most audacious stroke is his revival of a controversy that film scholars have deemed long settled: the question of who actually wrote, and/or contributed the most, to the script of Citizen Kane. Fincher pere et fil clearly imply that Mankiewicz deserves the lion’s share of credit, whereas actual evidence weighs far more heavily in Welles’ favor. 

 

Ah, but even here, Fincher’s script is cheekily ambiguous … because their Mankiewicz clearly isn’t the most reliable narrator of — or participant in — his own life.

 

(In the movie world, stubborn skeptics are akin to those who insist that Shakespeare’s plays actually were written by Francis Bacon. For the record, though, Welles and Mankiewicz shared the screenplay Academy Award, the sole victory among Kane’s nine Oscar nominations.)

 

Fincher opens his film in early 1940, as Mankiewicz is deposited at an isolated ranch in Victorville, California, roughly 90 miles from the hedonistic Hollywood environment that exacerbates his worst tendencies. He’s left with secretary Rita Alexander (Lily Collins), longtime friend and writing associate John Houseman (Sam Troughton), and a nurse (Monika Gossmann) to care for a badly broken leg sustained in a recent driving accident.

 

Mankiewicz’s assignment from Welles: to come up with the initial draft of a screenplay depicting the imperious career of a combustible newspaper mogul who — wink, wink, nudge, nudge — isn’t really based on William Randolph Hearst. Except that of course it is.