Mank (Film Review)
Dec. 7th, 2020 02:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakOr, another entry in this particular genre where a lot of talent comes together to produce something with much ambition and affection which ends up, alas, as something of a dud. IMO, mileage may vary, etc. I'm told David Fincher produced and directed his father Jack Fincher's screenplay to honor him, which is a lovely filial gesture, but imo a better honor might have been some resolute trimming and rewriting. Which, you know, happened to Herman Mankiewicz' original script for the movie later called Citizen Kane. A lot. (Not just by Orson Welles, who as opposed to what this movie claims did deserve his co-writing credit, but also by John Houseman, whose presentation in Mank as an shy pedantic fusspot endlessly saying "but Mank, you can't!" is a far greater reality distortion than anything else. But actually the biggest problem with Mank is not how accurate, or not, it is, but that it ends up as a meandering collection of anecdotes roughly held together with the "Mank writes Citizen Kane and has flashbacks" framing narration which go in all directions and manage to hint at a great many stories about 1930s and 1940s Hollywood, each of which might have been a good subject for a movie. But together they just feel like a whole lot of crammed footnotes in search of an editor.
Here's a David Selznick cameo! (Why?) There's Ben Hecht, playing cards with Mank! (Twice.) Irving Thalberg gets his own subplot, and actually comes across as interesting, but then he dies off screen, and Mank's anger over what Thalberg is doing is transfered to Louis B. Mayer anyway. Speaking of Mayer, there's the famous anecdote of him hamming it up with the "we're a family!" talk to cajole his employes to accept a half a salary pay cut in the middle of the Depression! Which says something about Mayer, alright, and there's considerable build up for Mayer as The Worst throughout the movie until the screenplay recalls that it actually has to justify why Mank picked Hearst, not Mayer, as a recognizable template for Kane, and we're told Mayer is actually just Sancho Pansa to Hearst's fallen Quixotte.
(The worst line here is when the audience stand-in secretary whom Mank is dictating his script to who goes from being appalled to admiring him in the framing narration asks him whether Bernstein (the Citizen Kane character) is supposed to be Mayer. What now, old man Fincher?)
While the script wanders from Hollywood anecdote to Hollywood anecdote in order to portray our hero Herman Mankiewicz as a self destructive talent and witty cynic with a heart of gold who comes through in all the big ways (he helps Jewish refugees leaving Europe, he's appalled by Thalberg & Mayer producing the 1930s equivalent of fake news for the GOP) , director David Fincher doesn't help himself by having cast Gary Oldman as Mank. Now I think Oldman can be brilliant as an actor, especially if someone casts him against type. (See also his George Smiley.) But here he didn't sell me on someone witty and charismatic enough that most of the other characters enjoy his company despite all the self indulgent drunkenness. Instead, he comes across as merely self indulgent and rambling. Of course he's not helped by everybody and their script writing assistant telling him he writes on Shakespeare-level (seriously, Fincher, didn't they teach you about show vs tell in film school?) and treat him as the best conversationalist since Oscar Wilde, while the script doesn't provide him with nearly enough good lines to justify such a lofty claim. Now you now whose scripts actually can pull off this kind of razzmattazz dialogue? Those of the brothers Mankiewicz. Which brings me to another frustration - one of the plots hinted at which a better movie would have made central is the relationship between Hermann and younger brother Joe. Who not only outranks Hermann as a scriptwriter in the most recent "100 greatest scriptwriters of all time" list (more here ) not least due to having written "All About Eve" ("Says Phyllis Nagy: “There may be a more endlessly quotable screenplay than All About Eve, but I’ve yet to find it") but managed to become one of the great Hollywood directors as well. Now why Joe managed to make it within the system while Hermann destroyed himself and how their fraternal relationship worked out while this was happening just begs for more exploration, and I liked the scenes between the brothers, but sadly Joe exits the movie (not before telling Hermann the script for not yet called Citizen Kane is the best thing he's ever written, you know, Shakespearean) after a very few cameo appearances.
But of course, the fraternal relationship has nothing to do with Citizen Kane, and Mank the movie wants to avenge Mankiewiczs in the Pauline Kael sense by insisting that he, and only he, is the true auteur of Citizen Kane. Now I have some general sympathy for the way directors tend to get all the credit in the public imagination and scriptwriters, if they aren't also directors like Billy Wilder or Joseph Mankiewiczs, get neglected or even ignored. But in order to hammer home this message, Mank the movie self sabotages in true self destructive drunk style. By which I mean: first of all, to point out the glaringly obvious, scriptwriting, especially in the Hollywood golden age, was and is in 98% of the cases a collaborative effort. As mentioned above, in the case of Kane, it wasn't just Welles doing the collaborating but also the - uncredited - John Houseman, and there's exactly one line in Jack Fincher's script which mentions Houseman does more than provide Mank with a place to stay in, read the evolving script and be worried, and it's blink and you miss it). Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard has some scenes - when Joe is co-writing with Betty Schafer - which are basically Wilder's love declaration to the collaborative working process and a pretty good illustration of how it actually worked at the time. Bouncing ideas and phrases at each other is quintessential, and it also enlivens the character interaction. But Mank the movie goes for the static "Mank dictates his work of genius" approach instead, with various characters asking him later "why this" and "why that?", which is a very different thing from "how about this?"/"yes, but then X needs to do that!" dialogue.
The other act of self sabotage is that the movie, on order to keep Orson W. from hogging the limelight again, banishes him to the most cameo of cameos, and Hearst is around only peripherally as well and Mayer, who is far more present than either Hearst or Welles and in two acts could be seen as the Big Bad and by the movie's logic should have been the target of Mank's script, instead gets downgraded to sidekick and has nothing to do with Citizen Kane at all. All of which means Mank the character has no central relationship with anyone, not in in the sense of having a friend turned foe, or an arch nemesis, or a villain to defeat. (And his relationship with his wife consists of them having endless variations of the same dialogue, revolving around "but why do stick around/love me?/ I've put up with you so far, must go to the finish now".) Again, I'm not even talkling about accuracy or not - this is a movie. It's a fiction. But by not choosing any of the available candidates for Mank to have a central relationship with, it doesn't provide its audience with a a reason to regard Citizen Kane as a dramatic pay off. (There's a very late, trying for climactic flashback scene in which the script seems to realize this and provides Mank with a drunk outburst which supposedly explains why Hearst, in an evident intended parallel for the Charlie vs Jedediah "you want to persuade people they ought to love you back" scene in Citizen Kane. Goldman, alas, is not Joseph Cotton. And the late J. Fincher definitely is neither Hermann Mankiewicz or Orson Welles. Who carefully built up the Leland and Kane relationship through the movie until this scene.)
And then there's the casting, even other than Oldman. Who is decades older than Hermann M. was, and if you handwave this with well, drinking yourself to death makes for rapid physical decline: most other people's ages don't match, either. Marion Davies is supposed to be in the same age group as Mank - and the aunt of Charlie Lederer (another character who would have been worth a closer exploration if you include him at all, given he wasn't just her nephew but also the husband of Orson Welles' first wife Virginia back then, with Welles in the habit of inviting himself over to breakfast with the new husband and the ex, who had this to say about her two husbands (to her and Welles' daughter Christopher, according to the later's memoirs: We couldn't stay mad at Orson, you see. He was an overgrown child, who could be maddening at times, God knows, but when he turned on the charm...' My mother and I exchanged a smile, both of us well acquainted with the Wellesian charm. 'Then Orson and Charlie just naturally gravitated towards one another. They were both brilliant, highly sophisticated men living in a cultural desert. Marion told me Charlie had graduated from the University of California when he was only 16. My God, Orson and I never even WENT to college, and here was Charlie, practically the youngest college graduate in history. So my two husbands got to be great friends, and they loved to commiserate about how difficult it was to be married to me.' She gave her husky, ironic laugh. 'But when it came to their personalities, they couldn't have been more unalike. Charlie was such a dear, sweet, funny man, and he didn't have Orson's crushing ego. He was a hell of a lot easier to live with, I can tell you.'
(For more on Welles, see also here.)
Seyfried as Marion Davies gives a charming performance, but one that comes across as way too young. I already talked about the John Houseman character assassination, and the performance certainly matches the script there. (Btw, Houseman's memoirs, Run-Through, are among the most quotably entertaining of the era, and a goldmine on both his explosive theatre partnershp with Orson Welles and on Herman Mankiewicz' writing of the original script for Citizen Kane.) Charles Vance is sharp and vaguely menacing as Hearst when he has a chance to be, but isn't around nearly enough to show some vulnerability as well. (Which is why it's quite a surprise when we're told a few minutes before the movie finishes he used to be an idealist back in the day.) . And Tom Burke is twenty years too old for Orson Welles at age 24 (so the script calling him a Wunderkind repeatedly is definitely tell vs show), but basically has only one scene where he gets more than do an impression of Welles' voice on the phone anyway, near the end. And that scene has some of the worst lines of the script. (It actually has new-to-Hollywood Welles tell Mankciewicz "You'll never work in this town again", just to make it clear once more who the true rebel genius and who the glitz without substance type is here.)
Lastly, in the category of "Wants to have its cake and eat it, too": because Mank despite the outward cynicism is inwardly a decent fellow and actually cares about Marion Davies' as a person, he not once, but twice, defends himself re: the character of Susan in Citizen Kane, once by saying it's not meant as a portrait of Marion, just of other people's perception of her, and later again towards the lady herself who then says she doesn't care how she is portrayed but that he shouldn't do this to Hearst. Now, the key problem of people identifying Susan with Marion Davis is that Susan has no talent, and Kane forcing her into a career she's not equipped for drives her into a suicide attempt before she leaves him. Meanwhile, Marion Davies while not suited to the dramatic heroine roles Hearst kept wanting for her was in most people's testimonies a delightful comedienne; she also didn't leave Hearst and actually helped him out with her savings when he fell on hard times. So if you take Susan as a portrait of Marion Davies - which a considerable part of the original audience did - it's one that is both cruel and unfair. ( Which is why the Susan/Marion association is practically the only thing Welles sounds guilty about through the decades of his post Kane life re: this movie.) Now, Mank the movie could have blamed the Susan characterisation on Mank's collaborators if it wanted to keep him from being responsible for it, but that would conflict with its key "only Mank wrote every single word of the script!" message ; otoh, a Mank capable of writing a part he has to know most people will take as a vicious portrait of his friend would conflict with the martyr/hero the movie wants him to be and would make him more morally ambigious than it's comfortable with. Presto, lame excuses.
And in conclusion? Watch RKO 281 instead. Which is a produced for tv movie from 1999 about the making of Citizen Kane, which also has a top cast - Live Schreiber as Welles, John Malkovich as Mank (who is the second most important role there), James Cromwell as Hearst, Melanie Griffith as Marion Davies, Roy Scheider as RKO producer George Schaefer, and the fabulous double act of Fiona Shaw and Brenda Blethyn as Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, Hollywood's gossip queens good at terrorizing studio heads left right and centre. It has the great advantage of actually allowing its characters room to breathe (so Welles and Mankiewiczs get to have a relationship before their bust-up re:the scriptwriting credit, Davies gets to be upset on her own behalf and gets to have a relationship with Hearst that we're shown, not told about, and Hearst while wrong in what he does is also presented as a human being. (As is Welles. In terms of fictional Welleses not played by Orson Welles, this version manages to have both the darker and better qualities in a believable balance, while other movies such as "Cradle Will Rock" or "Me and Orson Welles tend to go for the temper tantrums without the talent, while cameos like Welles' appearance in Ed Wood (Vincent D'Onofrio) are amusing but pretty much "legend X shows up, speaks lines, leaves.)
Here's a David Selznick cameo! (Why?) There's Ben Hecht, playing cards with Mank! (Twice.) Irving Thalberg gets his own subplot, and actually comes across as interesting, but then he dies off screen, and Mank's anger over what Thalberg is doing is transfered to Louis B. Mayer anyway. Speaking of Mayer, there's the famous anecdote of him hamming it up with the "we're a family!" talk to cajole his employes to accept a half a salary pay cut in the middle of the Depression! Which says something about Mayer, alright, and there's considerable build up for Mayer as The Worst throughout the movie until the screenplay recalls that it actually has to justify why Mank picked Hearst, not Mayer, as a recognizable template for Kane, and we're told Mayer is actually just Sancho Pansa to Hearst's fallen Quixotte.
(The worst line here is when the audience stand-in secretary whom Mank is dictating his script to who goes from being appalled to admiring him in the framing narration asks him whether Bernstein (the Citizen Kane character) is supposed to be Mayer. What now, old man Fincher?)
While the script wanders from Hollywood anecdote to Hollywood anecdote in order to portray our hero Herman Mankiewicz as a self destructive talent and witty cynic with a heart of gold who comes through in all the big ways (he helps Jewish refugees leaving Europe, he's appalled by Thalberg & Mayer producing the 1930s equivalent of fake news for the GOP) , director David Fincher doesn't help himself by having cast Gary Oldman as Mank. Now I think Oldman can be brilliant as an actor, especially if someone casts him against type. (See also his George Smiley.) But here he didn't sell me on someone witty and charismatic enough that most of the other characters enjoy his company despite all the self indulgent drunkenness. Instead, he comes across as merely self indulgent and rambling. Of course he's not helped by everybody and their script writing assistant telling him he writes on Shakespeare-level (seriously, Fincher, didn't they teach you about show vs tell in film school?) and treat him as the best conversationalist since Oscar Wilde, while the script doesn't provide him with nearly enough good lines to justify such a lofty claim. Now you now whose scripts actually can pull off this kind of razzmattazz dialogue? Those of the brothers Mankiewicz. Which brings me to another frustration - one of the plots hinted at which a better movie would have made central is the relationship between Hermann and younger brother Joe. Who not only outranks Hermann as a scriptwriter in the most recent "100 greatest scriptwriters of all time" list (more here ) not least due to having written "All About Eve" ("Says Phyllis Nagy: “There may be a more endlessly quotable screenplay than All About Eve, but I’ve yet to find it") but managed to become one of the great Hollywood directors as well. Now why Joe managed to make it within the system while Hermann destroyed himself and how their fraternal relationship worked out while this was happening just begs for more exploration, and I liked the scenes between the brothers, but sadly Joe exits the movie (not before telling Hermann the script for not yet called Citizen Kane is the best thing he's ever written, you know, Shakespearean) after a very few cameo appearances.
But of course, the fraternal relationship has nothing to do with Citizen Kane, and Mank the movie wants to avenge Mankiewiczs in the Pauline Kael sense by insisting that he, and only he, is the true auteur of Citizen Kane. Now I have some general sympathy for the way directors tend to get all the credit in the public imagination and scriptwriters, if they aren't also directors like Billy Wilder or Joseph Mankiewiczs, get neglected or even ignored. But in order to hammer home this message, Mank the movie self sabotages in true self destructive drunk style. By which I mean: first of all, to point out the glaringly obvious, scriptwriting, especially in the Hollywood golden age, was and is in 98% of the cases a collaborative effort. As mentioned above, in the case of Kane, it wasn't just Welles doing the collaborating but also the - uncredited - John Houseman, and there's exactly one line in Jack Fincher's script which mentions Houseman does more than provide Mank with a place to stay in, read the evolving script and be worried, and it's blink and you miss it). Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard has some scenes - when Joe is co-writing with Betty Schafer - which are basically Wilder's love declaration to the collaborative working process and a pretty good illustration of how it actually worked at the time. Bouncing ideas and phrases at each other is quintessential, and it also enlivens the character interaction. But Mank the movie goes for the static "Mank dictates his work of genius" approach instead, with various characters asking him later "why this" and "why that?", which is a very different thing from "how about this?"/"yes, but then X needs to do that!" dialogue.
The other act of self sabotage is that the movie, on order to keep Orson W. from hogging the limelight again, banishes him to the most cameo of cameos, and Hearst is around only peripherally as well and Mayer, who is far more present than either Hearst or Welles and in two acts could be seen as the Big Bad and by the movie's logic should have been the target of Mank's script, instead gets downgraded to sidekick and has nothing to do with Citizen Kane at all. All of which means Mank the character has no central relationship with anyone, not in in the sense of having a friend turned foe, or an arch nemesis, or a villain to defeat. (And his relationship with his wife consists of them having endless variations of the same dialogue, revolving around "but why do stick around/love me?/ I've put up with you so far, must go to the finish now".) Again, I'm not even talkling about accuracy or not - this is a movie. It's a fiction. But by not choosing any of the available candidates for Mank to have a central relationship with, it doesn't provide its audience with a a reason to regard Citizen Kane as a dramatic pay off. (There's a very late, trying for climactic flashback scene in which the script seems to realize this and provides Mank with a drunk outburst which supposedly explains why Hearst, in an evident intended parallel for the Charlie vs Jedediah "you want to persuade people they ought to love you back" scene in Citizen Kane. Goldman, alas, is not Joseph Cotton. And the late J. Fincher definitely is neither Hermann Mankiewicz or Orson Welles. Who carefully built up the Leland and Kane relationship through the movie until this scene.)
And then there's the casting, even other than Oldman. Who is decades older than Hermann M. was, and if you handwave this with well, drinking yourself to death makes for rapid physical decline: most other people's ages don't match, either. Marion Davies is supposed to be in the same age group as Mank - and the aunt of Charlie Lederer (another character who would have been worth a closer exploration if you include him at all, given he wasn't just her nephew but also the husband of Orson Welles' first wife Virginia back then, with Welles in the habit of inviting himself over to breakfast with the new husband and the ex, who had this to say about her two husbands (to her and Welles' daughter Christopher, according to the later's memoirs: We couldn't stay mad at Orson, you see. He was an overgrown child, who could be maddening at times, God knows, but when he turned on the charm...' My mother and I exchanged a smile, both of us well acquainted with the Wellesian charm. 'Then Orson and Charlie just naturally gravitated towards one another. They were both brilliant, highly sophisticated men living in a cultural desert. Marion told me Charlie had graduated from the University of California when he was only 16. My God, Orson and I never even WENT to college, and here was Charlie, practically the youngest college graduate in history. So my two husbands got to be great friends, and they loved to commiserate about how difficult it was to be married to me.' She gave her husky, ironic laugh. 'But when it came to their personalities, they couldn't have been more unalike. Charlie was such a dear, sweet, funny man, and he didn't have Orson's crushing ego. He was a hell of a lot easier to live with, I can tell you.'
(For more on Welles, see also here.)
Seyfried as Marion Davies gives a charming performance, but one that comes across as way too young. I already talked about the John Houseman character assassination, and the performance certainly matches the script there. (Btw, Houseman's memoirs, Run-Through, are among the most quotably entertaining of the era, and a goldmine on both his explosive theatre partnershp with Orson Welles and on Herman Mankiewicz' writing of the original script for Citizen Kane.) Charles Vance is sharp and vaguely menacing as Hearst when he has a chance to be, but isn't around nearly enough to show some vulnerability as well. (Which is why it's quite a surprise when we're told a few minutes before the movie finishes he used to be an idealist back in the day.) . And Tom Burke is twenty years too old for Orson Welles at age 24 (so the script calling him a Wunderkind repeatedly is definitely tell vs show), but basically has only one scene where he gets more than do an impression of Welles' voice on the phone anyway, near the end. And that scene has some of the worst lines of the script. (It actually has new-to-Hollywood Welles tell Mankciewicz "You'll never work in this town again", just to make it clear once more who the true rebel genius and who the glitz without substance type is here.)
Lastly, in the category of "Wants to have its cake and eat it, too": because Mank despite the outward cynicism is inwardly a decent fellow and actually cares about Marion Davies' as a person, he not once, but twice, defends himself re: the character of Susan in Citizen Kane, once by saying it's not meant as a portrait of Marion, just of other people's perception of her, and later again towards the lady herself who then says she doesn't care how she is portrayed but that he shouldn't do this to Hearst. Now, the key problem of people identifying Susan with Marion Davis is that Susan has no talent, and Kane forcing her into a career she's not equipped for drives her into a suicide attempt before she leaves him. Meanwhile, Marion Davies while not suited to the dramatic heroine roles Hearst kept wanting for her was in most people's testimonies a delightful comedienne; she also didn't leave Hearst and actually helped him out with her savings when he fell on hard times. So if you take Susan as a portrait of Marion Davies - which a considerable part of the original audience did - it's one that is both cruel and unfair. ( Which is why the Susan/Marion association is practically the only thing Welles sounds guilty about through the decades of his post Kane life re: this movie.) Now, Mank the movie could have blamed the Susan characterisation on Mank's collaborators if it wanted to keep him from being responsible for it, but that would conflict with its key "only Mank wrote every single word of the script!" message ; otoh, a Mank capable of writing a part he has to know most people will take as a vicious portrait of his friend would conflict with the martyr/hero the movie wants him to be and would make him more morally ambigious than it's comfortable with. Presto, lame excuses.
And in conclusion? Watch RKO 281 instead. Which is a produced for tv movie from 1999 about the making of Citizen Kane, which also has a top cast - Live Schreiber as Welles, John Malkovich as Mank (who is the second most important role there), James Cromwell as Hearst, Melanie Griffith as Marion Davies, Roy Scheider as RKO producer George Schaefer, and the fabulous double act of Fiona Shaw and Brenda Blethyn as Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, Hollywood's gossip queens good at terrorizing studio heads left right and centre. It has the great advantage of actually allowing its characters room to breathe (so Welles and Mankiewiczs get to have a relationship before their bust-up re:the scriptwriting credit, Davies gets to be upset on her own behalf and gets to have a relationship with Hearst that we're shown, not told about, and Hearst while wrong in what he does is also presented as a human being. (As is Welles. In terms of fictional Welleses not played by Orson Welles, this version manages to have both the darker and better qualities in a believable balance, while other movies such as "Cradle Will Rock" or "Me and Orson Welles tend to go for the temper tantrums without the talent, while cameos like Welles' appearance in Ed Wood (Vincent D'Onofrio) are amusing but pretty much "legend X shows up, speaks lines, leaves.)
