Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: David Fincher
Starring: Gary Oldman, Amanda Seyfried, Lily Collins, Arliss Howard, Tom Pelphrey, Sam
Troughton, Ferdinand Kingsley, Tuppence Middleton, Tom Burke, Charles
Dance
If Tim Burton had been honest in portraying the life of filmmaker Edward D.
Wood Jr, his 1994 biopic would be a very different movie. It would be a
tragic tale of depression, alcoholism and a man's struggle to balance his
lack of talent with his ambitions. Who knows, it could have been a great
movie, but it would have been depressing as hell and I doubt I would have
watched it a second time, whereas Ed Wood is a movie I return
to every few years. With his biopic, Burton opted to print the legend, and
gave us not the best movie about filmmaking, but one of the most charming.
Burton captured the spirit of Wood's endeavour, forsaking its grim reality,
and the film is a heartfelt tribute to a filmmaker who probably doesn't
deserve such memorialising.
With Mank, his biopic of screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz,
David Fincher refuses to print the legend. His movie isn't so much a
love letter to classic Hollywood as a poison pen parcel. In Fincher's film,
Hollywood is a town where dreams go to die, populated by egotistical
backstabbers. By all accounts, that's how it was, but for all the nastiness
that went on behind the scenes, they sure made some great movies.
You wouldn't know this from Fincher's film, as his characters are
constantly badmouthing the movies, none more so than "Mank" himself. Played
by Gary Oldman, who is for all intents and purposes regurgitating his
entertaining Churchill shtick with an American accent, Mank is the classic
embittered screenwriter who feels he's wasting his talent writing for the
movies. That waste of talent helped give us the Marx Bros and the transition
from sepia Kansas to technicolor Oz, two contributions curiously absent from
Fincher's film. In an era when Americans were dying in the streets of
starvation, Mank was pulling in $5,000 a week to write movies. Does he
really need a major motion picture to fight his corner?
Apparently Fincher's father, Jack, thought so when he wrote the movie in
the mid-90s (much of Mank, particularly an episode involving a suicidal director, suggests he was
watching a lot of The Larry Sanders Show at the time). Two
decades earlier, critic Pauline Kael had gone to bat for Mankiewicz in her
controversial essay 'Raising Kane', which argued the case for the writer as
the true author of a movie, which is a bit like hailing the girl with a
pearl earring over the Dutch artist who painted her. I'm baffled as to why
Mankiewicz is considered the unsung hero of Citizen Kane, when he's literally the only one of Welles's collaborators awarded with
an Oscar for the movie. Surely cinematographer Gregg Toland, editor Robert
Wise or art director Van Nese Polglase are more deserving of having the
spotlight shone on them, though I doubt their biopics would be anymore
interesting than Mank's.
Anyhow, Fincher Snr and Fincher Jnr have decided that Mank deserves his own
movie. It's a shame they weren't able to come up with a story to centre him
in. Mank is a directionless mess. It opens with the writer
being sent to an out of the way cabin in rural California where he is given
90 days to knock out a script provisionally titled 'American', to be
directed by Orson Welles (Tom Burke, who as with Oldman, is too old
for the part), whose radio production of 'War of the Worlds' caused such a
stir that RKO have awarded him with an unprecedented contract. Bedridden
thanks to an automobile accident, Mank bickers with his prissy English
secretary, Rita Alexander (Lily Collins), and Welles's right hand
man, actor John Houseman (Sam Troughton), while sneaking gulps of
whisky, aided by his German housekeeper (Leven Rambin). A subplot
involving Rita's RAF pilot husband going missing at sea is treated in an
unbelievably superfluous manner - neither Rita, Mank, nor the film itself
seem bothered by the news. It's indicative of one of the movie's glaring
issues - asking us to care about the relatively trivial matter of a screen
credit while the Great Depression and a World War are raging outside the
cloistered walls of entitled Hollywood.
By all accounts, Mankiewicz was one of the great wits of his time, so a
movie in which he's bedridden for the entire running time could well be a
riot. Fincher isn't known for his wit however, and his dourness translates
to his titular protagonist, who comes off more like a drunken uncle telling
dad jokes at a wedding rather than a knight of the Algonquin Round Table. To
pep things up, the Finchers inject flashbacks to the previous decade,
detailing Mank's friendship with actress Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried, the movie's saving grace) and his role as jester at the court of
publishing mogul William Randolph Hearst (a quietly sinister
Charles Dance). Fincher's camera follows Mank for a whirlwind tour of
the studio system, highlighting so many different bit players in the
non-drama that entire scenes consist merely of famous Hollywood
power-players being introduced simultaneously to the audience and Mank's
younger brother Joseph (Tom Pelphrey). There's a detour involving the
1934 California governor's race between Republican Frank Merriam and
socialist writer Upton Sinclair that hints at a far more interesting movie
than a biopic of a journeyman screenwriter, touching as it does on the birth
of media manipulation and "fake news."
Fincher can't resist gimmicky aesthetic touches like fake cigarette burns
and a sound design intended to make you believe you're watching the movie in
a cavernous auditorium back in the 1940s. But with its widescreen picture
and the telling lack of texture provided by modern digital video, it all
comes across as an anachronistic skit, as though classic Hollywood is being
parodied on a comedy sketch show. The backstage glimpses of 1940s Hollywood
we get here feel as fake as whenever Lieutenant Columbo would accidentally
wander onto a film set while investigating a killing in Tinseltown.
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's liberally employed score is
meant to mimic the big bands of the period, but at times it sounds more like
those Charlie Calello records of the disco era.
Who is Mank for? It's certainly not aimed at the average
subscriber to Netflix, a streaming service not exactly known for its
preservation of classic cinema. For any cinephiles interested in the studio
era and the various figures involved, it will come off as too
inconsequential, a rushed dummies guide to the backlot that insists on
throwing out the old stock Hollywood aphorisms we've all heard a million
times before ("If you want to send a message, use Western Union", "I
wouldn't want to be a member of any club that would have me" etc). For the
uninitiated, Mank will inspire two hours of head scratching
and prompts of "Who's this now, and why should I care?", and who can blame
them? Fincher never gives us any motivation to care about Mank's reputation.
Occasionally side characters assure us that Citizen Kane is
the best script he's ever written, but we're never shown why they believe
that to be the case. Fincher isn't a great filmmaker, the sort that can take
a mediocre script and turn it into a masterpiece, which might explain his
contempt for Welles. He falls into the category of a very good filmmaker who
will guarantee you a great movie if you give him a great script. Maybe
that's why he's shining a light on Mankiewicz, because he knows how much he
owes his screenwriters.
