You really should watch Citizen Kane before watching Mank.
I repeat: you really should watch Citizen Kane before watching Mank.
It’s rare that it should be necessary to do homework before seeing a movie, and perhaps that is some inherent mark against it, but David Fincher‘s first feature for Netflix is deeply indebted to Orson Welles’ breakthrough and the story behind its creation. In so doing it also adopts much of its look, structure, and thematic undertones, that while wholly differential from that 1941 masterwork (to many, still the greatest film ever made), still center on the inner workings of its heavyweight male protagonists.
Though perhaps most importantly, Mank is principally concerned with breaking the illusion of Welles’ own genius within the public eye. A formidable task, yet one that may leave its own indelible effect upon viewers, provided they come in with any sort of preconceived notion at all. To be frank, those that don’t already are likely not the audience for this film unless they’re prepared to meet Fincher halfway.
For his part, it’s been some time since Fincher has released a proper film. After the cooler than usual reception to Gone Girl, he concentrated on a number of television projects, including the rather good Mindhunter. And after a couple false starts (remember World War Z 2?), Mank finds him taking on his most personal project yet, though not for any immediately apparent subject matter related reasons. Instead, the story of Herman J. Mankiewicz (played here by Gary Oldman, in another fine example of why he’s one of our best living actors). his penning of the Citizen Kane script, and the events that built to that creative wellspring in the preceding years of his life has perhaps the most personal connection of all, in that the film’s screenplay was written by Fincher’s late father a few years prior to his death in 2003. And as life works go, it’s a rather good one.
As noted above, the elder Fincher structures Mank into a similar structure of “present day” and subsequent flashbacks. The anchoring narrative finds Mankiewicz recovering from a car accident and basically incapacitated, working in a sequestered fashion in the Hollywood Hills for Welles as he cracks the story for the filmmaker’s breakthrough feature. Interspersed throughout is basically “Mank’s” near decade journey to get to that point, from his early days as a West Coast screenwriter working in a writer’s room at Paramount, to MGM under the auspices of Louis B. Mayer (one of the Ms in said MGM), and his ongoing crossing of paths with William Randolph Hearst, the eventual inspiration for Charles Foster Kane.
In some ways, it would be easy to scoff at some of the touches the script lays out for how the Kane script comes together, like some interlocking puzzle that a cheaper biopic would say gives way to his great masterpiece (the kind of extrapolation that Walk Hard wonderfully lampooned). While those elements are present, the younger Fincher is able to skillfully background a lot of those moments to the point where they feel more like Easter eggs (“oh look, those monkeys must have been the inspiration for Kane’s monkeys at Xanadu!”). The focal point becomes the film’s sense of just who Mankiewicz is and his timeless struggle as an actively anonymous creative force. Even Mank’s most gratuitous example of shared idea space, which materializes its focus on Upton Sinclair’s failed gubernatorial bid in California, feels less like a lift for the sake of a Citizen Kane reference but instead a focal point of the underserved working man.
And that is really the rub of Mank. At its core, it’s a film that’s intended to tell the story of the credited co-screenwriter of Citizen Kane and act as a clear refutation of the myth that it sprang completely formed out of Welles’ mind alone. Now of course this is a one-sided tale, and the truth of the matter is that the film’s genesis is probably somewhere in between what’s presented here and the oft-told tale of Kane’s creation from Welles himself.
But therein lies the power of having both films presented together, as they play like yin and yang aspects of one another: the film as presented by Welles, starring Welles, and the script as it was developed by Mankiewicz, with an actor standing in as an advocate for his side of the story. One film is a decades spanning epic that encapsulates an entire (fictionalized) man’s life, the other is an intimate portrayal of his opposite number’s Hollywood career, and only envisions a small sliver of that time frame. One film is thematically concerned with its protagonist’s long held quest for something as elemental as love, while the other can be boiled down to a longheld struggle for fairness. They even share a sense of disorientation, where the first 15 or so minutes, a viewer will find themselves playing catch-up just to get a sense of who is who, and what exactly is happening. Though perhaps its more daring notion is that the finalized script itself, the movie’s “Rosebud”, if you will, is mostly an afterthought. All the more reason to do your homework and fill in those gaps if you need them.
Mank obviously can’t operate without Citizen Kane, or at least cannot have its same intended effect without incoming viewer familiarity, and of course that makes it the lesser work, but what an impossibly high bar to reach! Nonetheless, it’s a film that begs revisiting, particularly when taken in tandem with its source of inspiration, and maybe sprucing up your Pauline Kael reading while you’re at it. In total, Mank is an excellent evocation of an era, history lesson, and dispelling of a popular myth in its first viewing, it may very well prove absolutely essential in subsequent ones.
While you’re here, check out some of our other recent film reviews