Mank (David Fincher, 2020)

The through line in many of the reviews of David Fincher's new film Mank, a biopic of Herman J. Mankiewicz, the co-author with Orson Welles of the screenplay for Citizen Kane, is that we should not rely on Mank as a historical record, that it must be analyzed for its drama and not its accuracy. Fine. So then I'll try to make this short. 

Fincher locates the genesis of the Kane screenplay in Mankiewicz's despair over Upton Sinclair's loss in the 1934 gubernatorial election. In Fincher's telling, the campaign against Sinclair included newsreels produced by Irving Thalberg at MGM (where Mankiewicz was employed at the time) and funded by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Mankiewicz never forgave Hearst and thus jumped at the opportunity to lambaste him as Charles Foster Kane in Welles' film. 

The problem with this narrative gambit is that Fincher bit off more than he could chew. He flits back and forth between the 1934 election and the writing of Kane in 1940 in a hopeless attempt to emulate Kane's jumbled temporal structure and thus, he gives short shrift to dramatizing each event. For a good 45 minutes, the film isn't even all that comprehensible. And while I'll grant that these early scenes have a gulping energy (coupled with the attempts to make it feel like the viewer is watching a classical Hollywood film, e.g., echoing sound, cigarette burns at the top right of the frame, black-and-white photography, etc.), they come off more confusing than anything. The rhythms calm down some after that. But throw in a de facto Algonquin Room of writers (Ben Hecht, George S. Kaufman, etc.), a few parties at San Simeon, and some chats with Marion Davies and you have a mess.

Not a godawful one, mind. The two lengthy conversations between Mank (Gary Oldman) and Davies (Amanda Seyfried) evince rare moments of grace when the staircase wit stops and people converse with one another like adults. But those are balanced by an interminable, dramatically inert scene in which Mank harangues party goers at Hearst's estate with both Hearst and Louis B. Mayer improbably (oops - sorry for bringing accuracy in) sitting back and allowing him to ramble on (and puke on the floor for a coda). A decent film could have resulted from all of this in the hands of a director who approaches this kind of middlebrow peroject with a sense of economy, say, Stephen Frears. Instead, we get another bloated biopic on its way to Oscar glory.

And now if you'll excuse me, back to my Welles (and Josef Von Sternberg) Criterions (Criteria?). 

Grade: B-minus