People often say "they don't make them like that any more" and if they say that about Mank for a change it will be accurate. For the film is a thing of wonder and beauty, not only recreating a vision of Golden Era Hollywood but creating it in as close to the style of that era as can be attained. It is also dense and complex, crammed with brief glimpses of famous '30s faces and as the only other person in the cinema with me agreed afterwards, it's not going to make any money.
I know that's a kinda crass way to look at it. It feels like that scene in Inside Llewyn Davis where Llewyn plays a song for F Murray Abraham's music promoter - a beautiful haunting tune that could rip your heart out - and a stone-faced Abraham just says: "I don't see a lot of money here." That was a Coen Brothers film and the last time I had the same feeling was another film of theirs, Hail Caesar!. It finished and I thought "Damn, that was wonderful! No one's going to watch it."
But let's leave all that aside. Predicting failure seems cruel, especially when the object of the prediction is as extraordinary as Mank. As a devotee of Orson Welles with a fascination for the machinations of that Hollywood period I was happier than a monkey in a monkey tree. There is pretty much nothing that I didn't absolutely love about this film: it has remarkable cinematography, music, editing, acting, costumes, sets, and a great witty script from director David Fincher's late father, Jack.
But many of those things will be actively off-putting I would guess for a general audience...
The film's look is very low-contrast black and white. David Fincher said in a New Yorker interview that they shot in high resolution and then "took most everything and softened it to an absurd extent to try to
match the look of the era. We probably lost two-thirds of the
resolution in order to make it have the same feel, and then we put in
little scratches and digs and cigarette burns." Don't think that this looks something like Tarantino's Grindhouse experiment, but it is an extraordinarily "soft" black and white image. This still shows the unusual look very accurately:
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| Arliss Howard / LB Meyer Charles Dance / WR Hearst |
And the soundtrack is mono. No flashy super-surround effects here, but warm, slightly distorted mono with an analogue feel to it.
So on to the story. This is the tale of Herman Mankiewicz and his writing of Citizen Kane. It starts with him heading to a secluded ranch where he has been sent by Orson Welles with a secretary (Lily Collins - very good) and nurse, him to write, them to try and keep him off the booze. The film then spirals in many directions, much like Citizen Kane itself, confidently moving between flashbacks to explore Mank's relationship with the studio, his wife and friends, and the political climate.
There is just so much to enjoy, from testy sparring with Louis B Meyer (Arliss Howard) and Irving Thalberg, to his growing friendship with Marion Davis whom Seyfried's mercurial performance does a lot to rehabilitate, and of course William Randolf Hearst himself whom Charles Dance holds back from making a monster: it is a finely judged portrait, more three dimensional that one might have expected. There's also the relationship with his wife (Tuppence Middleton), carers
and brother (the famous Joseph Mankievicz, a solid Tom Pelphry) to take
in.
Where the film might lose people is the politics of the era, the rising "communist/socialist" menace and the studios' pushback against it. It seems a diversion, even if it contribtutes to Mank's increasingly fractious relationship with his studio masters.
Along the way there are more than a few delightful Citizen Kane homages, in the set-ups and lighting, all lovely little touches that are totally integrated. And playing Spot The Star is fun as famous names and faces pop into view, from John Houseman (Sam Troughton) to David O Selznick (Toby Leonard Moore), Josef Von Sternberg (Paul Fox) to Norma Shearer (Jessie Cohen). And of course there's Orson himself, very much just a walk-on but perfectly embodied by Tom Burke (actually I though he should have been taller but, otherwise, perfect). This is a film that will merit many many repeat viewings to spot all the subtleties.
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| Tom Burke / Orson Welles |
Gary Oldman strolls through everything with drunken aplomb. His Mankiewicz gets to be a continual witticism machine, every utterance a gem of observation, insight or sarcasm, often all three. And he's really good, as good as I've seen him. There are beautiful subtle moments of stillness to balance the grandstanding; Oscar nomination no doubt on its way, and well-deserved too.
For all that, perhaps the ultimate criticism is that you never really get inside, never get to know Mank. He remains as much of an enigma at the end as at the beginning. But perhaps that's fitting. That was a criticism people made about Citizen Kane but it seemed to be missing the point: Citizen Kane deliberately questioned how well you could really know anyone from snippets of their life. Mank doesn't do that as explicitly but the underlying principle remains.
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