Mank review: A movie about the creation of Citizen Kane is no Citizen Kane
On paper Mank is every cinephile’s dream: David Fincher’s long-awaited return to film-making adapting a script by his late father Jack about the creation of Citizen Kane, one of the most celebrated and revered movies of all time.
Mank, bankrolled by Netflix, stars Gary Oldman as the forever sozzled but nonetheless witty Herman ‘Mank’ Mankiewicz who, in late 1939, was recruited by wunderkind Orson Welles to write his debut Hollywood feature.
The script for Mank, originally written in the early 1990s, is largely inspired by Pauline Kael’s Raising Kane essay which eviscerated Welles and celebrated Mankiewicz as the true genius behind Kane’s Oscar-winning screenplay (both share a writing credit).
That essay, first published in The New Yorker, has since been widely discredited but its legacy lives on in Mank which casts Mankiewicz as a disgruntled but gifted Hollywood insider who decides to use his skills to twist the knife on one-time friend and millionaire William Randolph Hearst, the main inspiration behind Charles Foster Kane.
Despite hewing so closely to Kael’s mistaken hypothesis, anyone expecting a Social Network-esque tet-a-tet between Welles and Mank will be disappointed (the one scene featuring them both onscreen is the nadir of the movie).
Instead Fincher’s Mank is more concerned with the 1934 California gubernatorial election and the underhand tactics of MGM bigwig Louis B. Mayer to ensure it’s not won by socialist author Upton Sinclair.
In true Kane style this is shown through frequent flashbacks as Mank befriends Hearst (played by Charles Dance), his girlfriend Marion Davies ( Amanda Seyfried) and mixes with the rich Hollywood elite before slowly being soured towards them.
The film supposes its Mank’s distaste with the power wielded by both Hearst and Mayer (and his own roll in inspiring the original ‘fake news’ for the aforementioned election) that drives him, while bedridden from a car accident, to author Kane (which was then simply titled American).
It is the flashback scenes between Seyfried and Oldman where Mank really shines, with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s period-inspired score floating in the background (the faux cue marks used throughout to give the impression of a genuine 1940s feature don’t come off nearly as well).
Seyfried gives Davies a kind of wide-eyed innocence while not going full airhead and she revels in Mank’s witticisms and putdowns.
However beyond that there is no real insight into Mank’s genius or how he dreamed up Kane’s revolutionary story structure.
Mank says as he works on ‘American’: “You cannot capture a man’s entire life in two hours. All you can hope is to leave the impression of one.”
But Fincher isn’t clear with what impression he wants to give of Mank, nor of Kane’s authorship. It is not quite character study, nor biopic, not historical drama.
As every cinephile knows the real drama of Kane was after its creation — when a furious Hearst banned any advertising, reviewing, or mentioning of it in his papers. It was banned from screening in Hearst’s theatres and even booed at the Oscars where it won just one of the nine awards it was nominated for.
There is even one report of a Hearst ‘hatchet man’ hiding a 14-year-old girl in Welles’ hotel room in an attempt to have Welles jailed.
But we don’t even see Hearst’s reaction, instead we’re treated to Tom Burke’s furious Welles destroying Mank’s drinks cabinet (the film clumsily alleging this inspired Kane’s famous bedroom destruction at the end of Kane.)
At the end of the day Mank is a perfectly fine film (it is well shot and well edited with strong performances throughout) about the creation of a masterpiece. Just don’t go in expecting Citizen Kane.
Mank is in UK cinemas where Covid restrictions allow and is now streaming on Netflix.
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