Movie: Mank (2020)

Last night I saw "Mank", a new movie about Herman J. Mankiewicz writing "Citizen Kane". It's in black and white, with a period-esque score.

I'm a big "Citizen Kane" fan. It's a cliché to love that movie or to call it the greatest movie ever made, but I love it and genuinely think it's the greatest movie I've ever seen. It makes me cry every time I see it, and I've seen it hundreds of times. (There was a phase in my life when I watched it 5 to 10 times each week.)

In the early 70s, film critic Pauline Kael stirred up a controversy by claiming Orson Welles didn't deserve a screen credit for co-writing the script with Mankiewicz. Her arguments were picked apart over the years. In the end Kael was refuted, but we all learned that Welles' contribution was less than Welles claimed. Not surprising, but illuminating.

This film depicts the writing of the first draft, which everyone agrees was done by Mankiewicz alone. The film closes with Mank claiming sole credit for the script, but the film leaves out the revision process. That could mislead a viewer coming to this subject matter unaware of the history.

But this movie was not made for those viewers. It assumes we know a lot of general Hollywood history and specific "Citizen Kane" history. I respect and enjoy that, but a newsreel before the film that covered the basics would have been a) helpful and b) a fun reference to "Kane".

The film is full of visual references to "Citizen Kane". Deep focus, low angles and racked cameras, it's fun to spot them. They all help to tell the story, but not in the outlandish way they did in "Citizen Kane" itself. I didn't see any use of an optical printer.

This movie indulges in cosplay: there are fake reel change marks.

(For my younger readers, movies used to be distributed and projected from reels of film. Each movie consisted of multiple reels and a trained technician had to load them onto two alternating projectors and switch back and forth between them during the movie. A circle in the upper right corner (called a "cue mark" or "cigarette burn") indicated that a reel was ending and alerted the operator to switch reels. For more details, see David Fincher's previous film "Fight Club" or the Columbo episode "Make Me A Perfect Murder".)

The plot is full of flashbacks, covering the events that led to Mankiewicz writing the script. Characters from the flashbacks visit him, sort of the reverse of the Thompson character in "Citizen Kane" visiting the characters from Kane's past.

The film provides a motive for Mankiewicz's anger toward Hearst, but it fails to explain why his script was so mean to Marion Davies. In the film she is nothing but kind to him, and that jibes with everything I've read about the true story. I was hoping for some explanation there, some reason to portray her as such a crass failure, but I suspect there just isn't any. He was mean to Marion just to be mean to Hearst.

It's a good film, Fincher, but what it needs is an angle. "Kane" gut punches me every time by making me empathize with a monster - by setting up a sympathetic vibration between his flaws and mine, and unspooling the inevitable consequences of those flaws. "Mank" needs more of Mank's flaws and failure, maybe more of the consequences of his gambling and alcoholism. As portrayed, he's a cheery alcoholic with an altruistic streak. Showing more of his shadow would have made this a better film.