Stubs - Mank

Mank (2020) Starring: Gary Oldman, Amanda Seyfried, Lily Collins, Arliss Howard, Tom Pelphrey, Charles Dance. Directed by David Fincher Screenplay by Jack Fincher. Produced by Ceán Chaffin, Eric Roth, Douglas Urbanski. USA Black and White Run time: 131 minutes. Biography, Historical.

Hollywood films about Hollywood always run the risk of being too inside baseball for the average viewer. It gets more so when the subject matter is 80 years old, as it is with Mank, a biographical film about Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldham) a screenwriter on Citizen Kane (1941), or as the film purports, the writer on the film. Based on a claim, and some would say discredited one, by Pauline Kael in her 1971 New Yorker article Raising Kane that Welles did not deserve screenwriting credit, the screenplay was written by Jack Fincher, a little-known screenwriter, whose son turned out to be film director David Fincher.

The film concentrates almost solely on Mankiewicz writing the fictionalized life of William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies, who happens to be friends and admirers of his. We learn through a series of flashbacks the whys behind the smear piece, a sort of revenge for imagined and real injustices that Mankiewicz perceived were at the hands of Hearst, who at one time was a very powerful newspaper publisher and producer.

W.R. Hearst (Charles Dance) (r), and Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard) (l) get skewered by Mank.

In addition to W.R. Hearst (Charles Dance), Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard) and Irving Thalberg (Ferdinand Kingsley) also get skewered by Mank in person and by the film in general. When your protagonist is a loud-mouth bite-the-hand-that-feeds-him drunk, as Mank is portrayed, it’s difficult to be too hard on how other people react to him. He comes off as a very flawed man who could apparently write like no one else.

While the film concentrates on the writing of Citizen Kane and gives full credit to Mank, which I’m not disputing, it lacks one really crucial bit for me. Whose idea was it to write the movie in the first place? We’re set up that Welles wants to work with Mank and then we’re off to the races but was Mank told to write about Hearst or to write whatever he wanted? That is never made clear and while that might not affect the story the Finchers wanted to tell, it seems like it should have been stated somewhere along the way.

Shot in black and white, presumably because this is a period piece set in Hollywood’s Golden Age, the film wants to be treated the same as the film it is supposed to be about, as a classic. That can come across as a little heavy-handed.

For the most part, the acting is good but it is hard to judge whether any of the actors have truly captured the real personas of the people they are playing since again most of them are not familiar to modern audiences.

Gary Oldman as Herman J. Mankiewicz drunk and telling off his host.

Gary Oldman does his usual great job as the lead character, who is part genius, part drunkard, and part hero. Mank, as he’s called, according to the story in the film, brought over an entire village of Germans who had to escape Nazi terror. It’s hard to imagine how he could have afforded it since he is also a gambler who ends up, at one point, being $24,000 in debt, which was a substantial amount of money at the time.

Amanda Seyfried as Marion Davies.

Marion Davies is handled by Amanda Seyfried, who does a good job as well. Davies does not come across well in Kane despite Mank’s claim that the film is not about her. Seyfried seems to exude the star quality that I’m sure Davies radiated from all accounts I’ve read about her.

The film relies on the viewer to have a certain knowledge of the history of Hollywood to fully appreciate the story and I don’t think it does as good of a job setting some things up as it could have. Major Hollywood figures are given passing shots, some of them not as recognizable as you might think.

Further, the film doesn’t explore not only the idea behind the script but more primarily the central relationship of the film, that between Mank and Davies. We’re led to believe they have a special, though platonic, relationship but why? Things like that need a little more background than I saw on the screen. From what I understand about Davies, she apparently had many of these sorts of relationships but what made hers with Mank something special? Or at least to him?

Films like Mank may be some viewer’s only exposure to not only Citizen Kane but the story about the making of the film. Therefore, it should be noted that the film is not always historically accurate. Towards the end when Welles (Tom Burke) makes one of his cameos, he tells Mank that Louis B. Mayer made an offer to RKO to buy the property. While that’s true in part, the offer came after the film was completed and had been test-screened, not when it was merely the first draft of the screenplay.

And the film takes other historical liberties, including one incident that is supposed to have been a parable about the corruption of Hollywood when MGM’s test shot director, Shelly Metcalf (Jamie McShane) is so distraught about his involvement in making films for California gubernatorial candidate and incumbent Frank Merriam and against Upton Sinclair (Bill Nye) that he commits suicide. In reality, Felix E. Feist was the test shot director at MGM, who shot the propaganda films against Upton Sinclair, and he went on to have a career directing films until his death in 1965.

The film creates a view of Hollywood that no longer exists.
Here Mank is leaving out the front gates of Paramount.

I’m a bit of a sucker for films about Hollywood in its golden days. One of my favorite scenes was when Mank takes a new writer. Charles Lederer (Joseph Cross), into the writer’s room at Paramount with the likes of Ben Hecht and George S. Kaufman and then thrusting him into a meeting with producer David O. Selznick (Toby Leonard Moore) and director Josef von Sternberg (Paul Fox) and having him come up with the ending for the film idea.

While I liked the film overall, it is not without its problems. While I can easily see why it is nominated for so many Academy Awards, it would be ironic if Mank won more than Citizen Kane, which won only for Best Screenplay, and not in a good way.