Mank a Lousy Film

 

MANK (2020)

Directed by David Fincher

Netflix, 131 minutes, R (language, alcoholism)

★★

 

 

Herman J. Mankiewicz (1897-1953) was brilliant, erudite, and a talented writer who could crank out and/or fix scripts faster than Billy the Kid could draw a six-gun. He was also egotistical, stubborn, and a sloppy alcoholic who drank himself to an early grave. The Marx Brothers once delivered Paramount an ultimatum: If Mankiewicz was part of any of their future productions, they were done with movies.

 

Mank looks at the controversial Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) in three moments of his professional life: 1930, 1934, and 1940. The last of these the year that he co-wrote with Orson Welles–or completely wrote as he often claimed–the script for Citizen Kane, a film often cited as the greatest American film ever made. Alas, neither Director David Fincher nor his screenwriter father, the late Jack Fincher, chose to order their material in any sort of sequential order. That’s fashionable these days, but Mank is a bit like Wordle in that you have to take the small pieces you are given as the movie flits back and forth in time, then try to arrange them into a coherent whole. Most viewers didn’t bother, which is why Mank was one of the biggest box office duds of recent history; it earned back just over $122,000 of its $25 million production costs.

 

In other words, Mank is a rotten movie devoid even of being good camp. It would have gotten zero stars had it not been for its strong performances and its production design. The latter won numerous awards, including an Oscar for stylish black-and-white backdrops that subtly evoke Depression Era Hollywood. Inexplicably, cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt also won an Oscar, though much of his camera work looks fake.

 

Oldman is outstanding, but his performance was wasted as there’s not enough background information to make sense of the major players or their crisis points. The Finchers forgot that audiences can be a film fans without being film historians. If you don’t know already know about people such as S. J. Perlman, John Houseman (Sam Troughton), Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried), or Irving Thalberg (Ferdinand Kingsley), add those blanks to your script Wordle. Throw in a few invented characters and you’ve got a thin and unappetizing hobo stew.

 

It's too bad, as we are left with a good-looking movie set in a dangerous and fascinating times–the Depression, the rise of fascism, California’s 1934 gubernatorial election–and imperious characters, but we spend too much time trying to work out who’s who and what’s what. The film dips into Mankiewicz’s life as he reconnects with an old friend, actress Marion Davies; befriends her sugar daddy, publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance); matches wits with Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard), the tyrannical head of MGM; wins the respect of his personal secretary Rita Alexander (Lilly Collins); plays dueling egos with Orson Welles (Tom Burke); and manages to hold on to his long-suffering wife Sara (Tuppence Middleton). Each actor is quite good, though you’ll probably wonder to what, when, and where their performances are supposed to be connected.

 

If you are tempted to watch Mank, the film’s many jumps are between three junctures of Mankiewicz’s life. The first was getting his foot in the MGM door in 1930–he was hired and fired from studios on a regular basis–via Davies and Hearst. In the second, Mank strains his relationships with Mayer and Hearst over the 1934 election in California that pitted conservative Republican Frank Merriam against socialist upstart and novelist Upton Sinclair (“Science Guy” Bill Nye in a cameo). Mankiewicz was a Sinclair supporter who knew the difference between socialism and communism, whereas Hearst and Mayer were right-wingers who plotted to undermine Sinclair. Finally, the 1940 sequences are of Mank recuperating from a broken leg, getting plastered, burning his MGM bridges, and completing the Citizen Kane script for RKO Studios. There’s also a subplot of Mank’s relationship with his younger brother Joe (Tom Pelphery). Trust me, though, when I tell you I have just made more sense of the film than the script managed to do.

 

Ultimately Mank is a what-were-they-thinking? movie. In more ways than one Mank reminded me of a line from the classic film On the Waterfront: “I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of bum, which is what I am.” That’s nicer than saying Mank stank.

 

Rob Weir