As the film critic Donald Trump once pointed out, “There was a great rise in ‘Citizen Kane,’ and there was a modest fall. The fall wasn’t a financial fall. The fall was a personal fall. But it was a fall nevertheless.” Wise words, equally applicable to Humpty Dumpty. Risings and fallings abound in David Fincher’s new movie, “Mank,” which was written by his late father, Jack Fincher, and is largely about the creation of “Citizen Kane” (1941). The title refers to Herman J. Mankiewicz, who is credited, at the end of “Citizen Kane,” as the co-author of the screenplay, together with a guy named Orson Welles. Their work was honored with an Academy Award—the only Oscar that the film received. Neither man showed up for the ceremony, in 1942, at the Biltmore Hotel, where, it is said, every mention of “Citizen Kane” was jeered.
Mankiewicz, who worked for this magazine in its infancy, before eloping west, was one of those people who are so deeply rooted in their era that you can’t imagine them living at any other time. He looked like a highly amused potato. Trying to think of something that he didn’t laugh at is a thankless task. (There is a photograph of him dressed up as Groucho, Chico, and Harpo Marx simultaneously.) His mug was round and knobbly; his mouth was wide and fully occupied, with booze going in and a gurgle of words flowing out. He was a gambler, too. On one occasion, according to “Mank,” he bet five thousand bucks on the fall of a leaf. So, who should play him onscreen? W. C. Fields could have done it, long ago, on condition that the props department supplied real alcohol, not some filthy aqueous substitute. Charles Durning would have been ideal. Oliver Platt, perhaps, might fit the bill. In the event, Fincher plumps for Gary Oldman, who, after triumphing as Winston Churchill, in “Darkest Hour” (2017), is no stranger to men of whopping appetites and liquor-boosted wit.
“Mank” pays tribute to “Citizen Kane” in aspects great and small. The snow globe, slipping from the hand of the dying Kane at the outset of Welles’s film, is nicely echoed by Fincher with a closeup of an empty bottle, tumbling from his hero’s grasp. Both films are in black and white, and both are chronologically restless, dancing to and fro from year to year. We start in 1940, with Mankiewicz en route to Victorville, an hour or two from Los Angeles. He has a leg in plaster and a mission to fulfill. At a lonely ranch, with a secretary, Rita Alexander (Lily Collins), to take dictation and to keep him off the sauce, he must generate a script for Welles’s début film. John Houseman (Sam Troughton), Welles’s theatrical comrade, will oversee the progress of the plan. (Troughton plays him as a fusspot, with diction to match: “We’re expecting grrreat things,” “We’re at a Rrrubicon moment.” Was Houseman quite as prim as that?) Now the flashbacks kick in. One presents us with the car crash that injured Mankiewicz; another spirits us to 1930, with the writer Charles Lederer arriving at Paramount Studios. He bears an alluring telegram from Mankiewicz, informing him, “There are millions to be made and your only competition is idiots.”
There was such a telegram, although, in truth, it was sent to Ben Hecht. “Mank” does a lot of this—polishing old show-biz myths and rearranging them on the mantelpiece. Thus, the well-worn line about using Western Union, rather than a movie, if you need to send a message is randomly assigned to Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard), the lord of M-G-M. Similarly, every Mankiewicz fan has heard about his vomiting at dinner, apologizing to his host, and explaining that it’s O.K., because the white wine came up with the fish; but where did the gag occur? Fincher places it at San Simeon, the plush stronghold of William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance, in excellent fettle), where Mankiewicz was often invited, in the nineteen-thirties. There, once more in flashback, we watch him, in his capacity as court jester, diverting and offending the other guests.
He becomes a particular pal of Hearst’s long-suffering companion, the actress Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried), whom we first encounter as she stands atop a pyramid of wood, with the cameras about to roll, ready for her immolation. “What’s at stake here?” Mankiewicz inquires. Later, he and Davies take a moonlit stroll, among the statues and the private menageries. “Now, that’s sticking the old neck out,” Mankiewicz says, as they approach the giraffes.
The lines are funny, but not that funny, and it’s never easy to make us believe in someone of lofty comic repute. (Another supposedly all-conquering wag is the protagonist of “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” which appeared a year after “Citizen Kane.” He hurts a hip at the start of the movie and spends the rest of it firing off zingers from a supine position, and yet, as played by Monty Woolley, he can’t live up to the hype. Some folks thought that the part should have gone to Welles.) Is Oldman, though technically dazzling, the right man for the job? As a rule, what he radiates onscreen is not warm humor so much as a nipping comic ferocity; rarely are we not afraid of him, and that’s a problem for the new film, because Mankiewicz is meant to be tolerated, if not loved, by those who know and employ him. No one is more patient than his wife, Sara (Tuppence Middleton)—habitually referred to as “poor Sara,” though she finally snaps and demands that the habit cease. Good for her. Hearst, likewise, listens to Mankiewicz’s bons mots with a lenient smile and says, “That’s why I always want Mank around.” And guess how Mankiewicz repays the favor. He turns San Simeon into Xanadu and Hearst into Kane, the hollowest of hollow men. Or so the legend goes.
Who wrote “Citizen Kane”? How long have you got? In 1971, The New Yorker published “Raising Kane,” a two-part investigation of the puzzle by Pauline Kael. She argued that Mankiewicz was a prime mover of the film, essential to its ambience of fun, and that his thunder was stolen by the perfidious Welles. Her case was made with typical trenchancy and dash, and answered (dismantled, some would say) by Robert Carringer, in his 1985 book “The Making of ‘Citizen Kane,’ ” which traced Welles’s reshaping of the screenplay, over many drafts, after Mankiewicz was done.
A more provoking question: Who cares who wrote “Citizen Kane”? Historians of cinema will shriek at the very notion, but we need to remind ourselves that millions of movie watchers couldn’t give a damn either way, and I wonder what they will make of “Mank.” On the one hand, it’s a Kaelite enterprise, dwelling on Mankiewicz and shunting Welles, played with palpable relish by Tom Burke, firmly into the sidings. On the other hand, the pop and the zest that Kael admired, in “Citizen Kane” and elsewhere, are in curiously short supply. Fincher’s film is gorgeous to behold, with its bright and feathery texture, plus a delicate spectrum of grays; thanks to digital sorcery, the leaves of trees look as white as snow, as they used to do on infrared film. But to what purpose? The richer shadows and yawning angles of “Citizen Kane” answer to Kane’s vision of the world, tilted off balance by solitude and wealth, whereas the dreaminess of “Mank” seems to sap it of dramatic momentum.
As for the action, much of it consists of a man lying in bed and spinning a yarn. Fincher, clearly alive to the threat of stagnation, insures that his hero’s labors are regularly interrupted by visitors to the ranch, including Davies, Lederer, Welles, and Mankiewicz’s brother Joe (Tom Pelphrey), who would later direct “All About Eve” (1950) and “Cleopatra” (1963). Meanwhile, inside the flashbacks, other famous figures come and go, or so the credits allege; apparently, we get a Clark Gable, a Bette Davis, and even a Garbo, though I swear I didn’t see them flit by. The whole movie, indeed, has an air of this-then-that, in lieu of a plot, and we are left to work out how, or if, the pieces lock together. There’s a detailed excursus into the California gubernatorial race of 1934, which Upton Sinclair lost, running on a poverty-fighting platform. Mankiewicz backed him, to Louis B. Mayer’s disgust: gripping stuff, no doubt, but what’s it doing here?
Then, there’s the scene in which the housekeeper at the ranch, Frieda (Monika Grossmann), reveals that an entire village of German Jews was able to emigrate to safety with Mankiewicz’s aid. What? When? Accurate or not, it has the smack of a tall tale, of the kind that Mank would be the first to make sport of. (He became, in his own words, an “ultra-Lindbergh,” protesting America’s entry into the Second World War—a caprice on which “Mank” chooses not to touch.) What we have here, in short, is a portrait of the artist as a contrarian, bent upon self-sabotage, and what it sorely lacks is a Rosebud. Many viewers of “Citizen Kane” are disappointed by that narrative dingus, with its link to a lost childhood, and Welles himself disparaged it as “dollar-book Freud.” But it’s meant to be disappointing; the Grail is worth less than the quest, and the quest provides that film with its immortal swagger. “Mank,” by comparison, is a story of a story, and, for all its great beauty, it winds up chasing its own tale. ♦
