David Fincher (2020)
David Fincher’s biopic of Herman J Mankiewicz is built round the bringing forth of its subject’s most famous work. American, the draft screenplay which Mankiewicz delivered in early 1940, developed into Citizen Kane. Natal vocabulary is irresistible here, given the conditions in which the script was written. Orson Welles arranged for Mankiewicz, a chronic alcoholic, to retreat from Hollywood to a ranch in Victorville, California, where he worked under the watchful eye of John Houseman, Welles’s former partner in the Mercury Theatre. Since the ranch was also an alcohol-free zone (that was the idea, anyway), this, for Mankiewicz, truly was a confinement. The history of the screenplay for Fincher’s film, in a minor way, is remarkable, too. It was written in the 1990s by David’s father, Jack. According to Wikipedia, his son planned to make a film of it immediately after The Game (1997). That didn’t happen but now, seventeen years after his death, Jack’s screenplay has finally reached the screen. It would only be natural for Mank to mean a lot personally to David Fincher. A pity, then, that it’s not better.
Cineastes may see Mank as inherently important because it centres on the gestation of a cinema classic and because the relative contributions of Welles and Mankiewicz to the Citizen Kane script are a matter of enduring controversy (which Fincher’s film, in effect, helps sustain). The trouble is, Mank doesn’t stand on its own two feet – the cognoscenti may be blind to how puzzling it’s liable to be to an audience not au fait with the history, or mythology, of Citizen Kane. For example, Joseph Mankiewicz isn’t the only character in Fincher’s film to worry that his elder brother has gone too far in basing the character of Susan Alexander in American on the Hollywood actress Marion Davies, and to tell Mank as much. If you don’t already know Susan Alexander’s fate in Citizen Kane you won’t be much enlightened by Mank – and will probably be left wondering what all the Marion fuss is about. The larger significance of what’s happening on screen is consistently opaque. There’s little synergy between the scenes in which Mank (Gary Oldman) is dictating American to a secretary, Rita Alexander (Lily Collins) – her family name presumably inspired Susan’s – and flashbacks to his experiences in Hollywood over the preceding decade or so. It’s seldom easy to see how these past experiences inform the script developing in the film’s present. It’s hard even to know if Mank is meant to be remembering the flashbacks – or if they’re there just because David Fincher wants them to be.
Fincher means to construct an(other) exposé of the underbelly of Golden Age Hollywood. He needs to show something of Mank’s interactions with William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance), the inspiration for Charles Foster Kane, and how Mank’s animus towards Hearst turned Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried), as the media mogul’s companion and protégée, into collateral damage. This much is clear. But why is so much time devoted to, say, the ill-fated campaign of Upton Sinclair (Bill Nye) to become governor of California, in 1934? Hollywood establishment figures – including Irving Thalberg (Ferdinand Kingsley) and Louis B Mayer (Arliss Howard), presented in Mank merely as a homuncular Hearst cheerleader – vigorously oppose Sinclair’s candidacy (MGM orchestrates a smear campaign against him). Fincher soon gets this across; as a result, his lengthy coverage of election night feels surplus to requirements. Other retrospective sections, even when their relevance is more obvious, tend to go on too long. This is especially true of a costume party chez Hearst, crashed by a paralytic Mank, who hasn’t dressed for the occasion. It’s an age before he stops talking, vomits and reassures the appalled guests that the white wine came up with the fish.
You wonder quite how artificial David Fincher intends Mank to be. Erik Messerschmidt’s elegant black-and-white cinematography announces the film as a cross-reference to an earlier film-making era and a particular movie cynosure of that era. I don’t know in how much detail Mank s look is meant to evoke Gregg Toland’s images for Citizen Kane. I can only say I was sometimes reminded of the visuals of more decidedly noir pictures: the opening shots of the car bringing Mank to the Victorville ranch called to my mind, rather than Kane, the start of Sunset Boulevard. (While the shadows and angles in Welles’s film have led to its being termed a proto-noir, I’d always thought Toland’s deep-focus photography was regarded as Citizen Kane‘s visual USP.) Fincher introduces each scene of Mank with an on-screen indication of where and when it’s taking place. This is helpful (especially the when, since the flashbacks don’t occur in chronological order) but the font used for these signposts, echoing the look of a typewritten screenplay of bygone days, has the effect of putting the action in quotation marks – suggesting another kind of Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. More important, unreality also pervades the acting in Mank.
The lead player’s surname is more significant than it should be. Gary Oldman, who has put on a few pounds for the role, looks more than his actual age of sixty-two. Herman Mankiewicz was in his early forties when he put together American. Seriously overweight as well as alcoholic, he looked older but not in excess of of twenty years older. Nor does Oldman offer much in the way of physical and spiritual contrasts: whether holed up on the ranch or hobnobbing in Hollywood, his Mank cuts the same dissolute, dishevelled figure. John Houseman wrote of Mankiewicz that his ‘behavior, public and private, was a scandal … he was also one of the most intelligent, informed, witty, humane and charming men I have ever known’: Oldman answers to few of those adjectives. Mankiewicz’s acerbic wit was legendary. Oldman, in a self-approving but colourless performance, has evidently decided the best way to deliver witty lines is by telegraphing his awareness that they’re witty. The effect is very soon tiresome. Wikipedia says that Fincher, when first planning to bring his father’s script to the screen, had Kevin Spacey in mind for the title character. If only! Leave aside the gulf between him and Gary Oldman in terms of their way with words. Spacey would also have suggested in his face and body – much more, and more subtly, than Oldman does – how Mankiewicz saw himself.
Oldman’s metronomic line readings seem to have infected most of the cast. Except for Orson Welles, the famous names in this story aren’t also famous voices[1]: the actors’ interpretations of them are unlikely to be judged on the basis of accurate mimicry. Yet nearly everyone, even Lily Collins as the secretary, gives the impression of doing an impression. The vocal mannerisms of Sam Troughton’s John Houseman are an especially blatant example. As Marion Davies, Amanda Seyfried suggests in her eyes an emotional complexity absent from her voice; and Tom Pelphrey’s Joseph Mankiewicz, in this company, is refreshingly natural. But things have come to a pretty pass when Charles Dance is one of the highlights of a film. He gestures too much in his last bit – Hearst, regaling the drunken Mank with a monkey-organ grinder allegory as he shows him the door at Hearst Castle – but he’s good in an earlier outdoor scene at San Simeon, capturing Hearst as monarch of all he surveys. And at least Dance’s voice sounds as if it belongs to him. Tom Burke, with the challenging assignment of convincing as Orson Welles, is crisply droll in phone conversations with Mankiewicz, though the verbal showdown between them when Welles eventually pays a visit to Victorville is anti-climactic. But Burke, like Oldman, is the wrong age. It makes little sense for people in the film to refer repeatedly to twenty-five-year-old Welles as the ‘boy wonder’ when he’s played by an actor pushing forty.
Citizen Kane, notoriously, won only one of the nine Academy Awards for which it was nominated: the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay went to Herman J Mankiewicz and Orson Welles (in that order). Both were absentees from the ceremony; David Fincher includes as a postscript to Mank the reactions of the two men on the morning after the Oscar night before. As I write this, Fincher’s film is second favourite on Gold Derby ‘experts’ ante-post lists for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay at next spring’s Oscars. Amanda Seyfried is favourite for Best Supporting Actress. (The lists don’t include the craft categories in which the film may well also get nods). It’s quite possible the Academy Awards for 2020 will see the overlong (131 minutes) and etiolated Mank outperform the movie on which it depends. That would make the funny old year of 2020 look even more of a bad joke.
8 December 2020
[1] Those who were both make blink-and-you-miss-them, non-speaking appearances in Mank. According to Wikipedia, they include – among many others – Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Clark Gable, Greta Garbo and Carole Lombard.
