Mank

Regrettably, Netflix's highly promoted  new film, Mank, isn't too good.  The picture is handsomely produced and features Gary Oldman as Herman Mankiewicz, the Hollywood screenwriter who wrote Citizen Kane.  Mank is carefully written itself, replete with aphorisms and bon mots that resemble things that Oscar Wilde might have said if he were a tough-guy New York Jew.  The film is ambitious and its gleaming Art Deco black and white  photography is streamlined and sleek, but, ultimately, the subject matter is simply too thin to support a two-hour plus movie.  Mankiewicz, a chronic alcoholic, wrote Citizen Kane, a script for which Orson Welles later claimed the lion's share of credit, while recovering from a broken leg in a remote sanitarium at Victorville, California.  Mankiewicz was flat on his back and heavily medicated (it seems Welles and RKO had provided him with a crate of booze laced with Seconal) and, of course, the work of a writer, most of which takes place in the imagination, is essentially invisible.  There's no edifice constructed before our eyes, just an ever-increasing number of typed pages, and scriptwriting in these circumstances is, more or less, solitary work.  Therefore, for much of the movie, Mankiewicz has no one with whom to trade witticisms -- he's mostly isolated, surrounded by women who minister to his physical needs as an invalid but don't necessarily have anything interesting to say to  him.  From time to time, we see him on the phone conversing with the arrogant and unpleasant Welles and John Houseman from the Mercury Theater hectors him from time-to-time about his progress and his drinking.  Accordingly, the heavy lifting in the movie has to take place in flashbacks.  These interpolations into the present (1940 and Mankiewicz confined to the sanitarium) are overly explicit -- each signaled by a glimpse of the script for Mank helpfully establishing the date, the location, and that what we are seeing is a "flashback" (it's written right on the page).  The flashbacks relate to Mankiewicz's relationship with Louis B. Mayer at MGM and, then, his encounters with William Randolph Hearst, and his mistress, Marion Davies at San Simeon, seemingly the source of the scandalous material about the great muckraking newspaper tycoon retailed in Kane.  These flashbacks which take place at the height of the Depression in 1934 and later in 1936, an election year in which Mankiewicz supported the Socialist candidate Upton Sinclair against the Republican, Merriam, in the California gubernatorial race.  Too much has been politicized these last few years and the film doesn't do itself any favors by implying that Sinclair v. Merriam is an analogy for Biden v. Trump.  Clearly some equivalences are emphasized by the film -- Sinclair is tarred with the label of Socialist and the Merriam campaign relies heavily on lies and deceit, that is, carefully contrived deceit broadcast to the voting public.  (Probably, when the film was produced, the director David Fincher thought that Bernie Sanders might be the Democratic presidential candidate, thus making the equation between the self-proclaimed Socialist Sinclair and Sanders even more overt.)  The Republican campaign, backed by Louis B. Mayer working as henchman for the suave William Randolph Hearst, is a surrogate for the Trump campaign and the Conservative party gets itself involved in all sorts of skullduggery, including saying that if Sinclair won the election a horde of transient hobos would destroy property in the suburbs -- pronouncements that echo some of what was argued by Trump in his campaign. (San Simeon stands in for Mar-a-Lago).  The problem is that this subplot, involving arcana from California politics now more than 80 years ago isn't too interesting and, in fact, seems somewhat unrelated to the principal plot involving Mankiewicz' labor on the Kane script.  In fact, the political subplot is necessary to the narrative but for a reason that tends to undercut the entire film and that, in fact, demonstrates more than a little bad faith in the screenwriter for Mank.  (The script is probably as good as it can be, given the inherently non-dramatic narrative -- an aging drunk lying in bed and., sometimes, dictating to a female amanuensis.  But it's full of holes, tries way to hard to make its points -- as witness the political subplot -- and simply unconvincing.  Jack Fincher, the director David Fincher's father, wrote the scenario and, despite the wealth of period detail, and inside Hollywood lore, the story simply doesn't work on any level -- the dialogue is too clever and snarky by half and, ultimately, the audience wonders if there is a there there -- and there isn't; the whole thing ends up being weirdly inconsequential.)

Here is the film's big problem.  Mankiewicz, who is treated with kid gloves and imagined to be a sort of secular saint, in fact, is an unattractive character.  First, he's a hopeless drunk.  The film shows Mankiewicz as gallant in a doomed sort of way, but watching an alcoholic destroy himself (and those around him) is a questionable sort of entertainment.  (And the film traffics in offensive cliches -- when Mankiewicz stalls out during his work on the script, his female assistants at the Farm get him a crate of booze; fueled by excellent bourbon, Mank overcomes his problems with the script and, while drunk, does his best work.  This view of alcoholism is as archaic as John Wayne pouring beer into Dean Martin in Rio Bravo to dry him out -- the bottom of the narrative falls out and we find ourselves in the 1950's swilling martinis as a aid to esthetic endeavor.)  Second, Mankiewicz betrays his friendship with both Marion Davies, who is shown to genuinely like the sourpuss screenwriter, and Hearst himself.  Hearst admires = Mank and has him sit next to him at his feasts in San Simeon and, in fact, the mogul seems like a reasonably nice guy.  Of course, he has Marion Davies' love, authentic it seems, to vouch for him.  So, it seems inexcusable that Mank would betray the old man and attempt to humiliate him on-screen -- "rosebud" as the film notes was, possibly, Hearst's pet name for his wife's clitoris.  What Mankiewicz does seems objectively unreasonable and, probably, inexcusable -- he's been feted by the old man who has put up with his offensive drunkenness and, then, turns around and betrays him by proffering all sorts of scandalous rumor in the public marketplace.  It's an unsavory spectacle.  Finally, Mankiewicz has signed a contract with RKO providing that Welles would be given full credit for the script.  The climax of the movie, which is supposed to be its triumphant ending, involves Mankiewicz breaching the agreement, much to the rage of the egotistical and offensive Orson Welles.  But the fact is that a contract is a kind of promise and Mankiewicz was paid to write the script and attribute it to Welles and his decision to breach the agreement seems morally (and legally) questionable.  It's an odd film that has for its high point a man breaching an agreement that he has made in writing for purely self-aggrandizing reasons.  So how do the Finchers, pere et filles, contrive to make a treacherous drunk the hero of the film?  This is where the apparently extraneous political subplot figures in the scheme of the film.  Mayer and Hearst's political opposition to Sinclair is made to seem so vicious that it gives Mankiewicz the right (even the obligation) to torpedo the newspaper tycoon.  Mank's bad conduct is excused, as it were, by the wretched, politically savage carnage inflicted on Upton Sinclair by the head of MGM and Hearst.  But a moral argument of this sort, which the film is really too ashamed to present outright, makes no sense.  Two wrongs don't make a right as I'm sure your mother informed you long ago.  The same strategy is employed to excuse Mankiewicz' nasty breach of promise to Welles.  Orson Welles is portrayed as so vain and ludicrous that, of course, Mankiewicz has every right to betray him as well.  In this respect, the film also hedges its bets by showing that having the authorship of Citizen Kane attributed to Mankiewicz causes him to be the subject of various threats -- in the last part of the movie, various characters try to talk Mankiewicz out of allowing the movie to be produced.  But none of this makes any sense because there's no indication that Mank has any ability to keep RKO or Welles from producing the movie he has written.  Therefore, efforts by Marion Davies to cajole him into somehow queering the project -- as well as Joe Mankiewicz and Charles Lederer, also begging him to stop the production -- seem completely unwarranted:  what is Mank supposed to do to preclude the film to stop Kane from reaching theaters?  The entire picture, accordingly, is designed to vindicate Mank's questionable behavior both with respect to betraying his friend William Randolph Hearst and, then, reneging on his contract with Welles.  Curiously, enough the film doesn't really make the only argument that could be plausibly advanced on this topic -- that is, that genius has its own prerogatives.  Wagner was a swine but he wrote great music.  Mankiewicz is a fickle drunk but this doesn't mean that he wasn't a great artist as well.  But this justification, an argument that I might accept, is no longer viable in a world that has canceled Garrison Keillor, Woody Allen, and Roman Polanski for their bad behavior -- an artist's work is no longer reliably regarded as distinct from his life and, therefore, Fincher doesn't dare excuse Mank on the basis that genius has its privileges, perhaps, unavailable to the rest of us.  (And, in fact, the movie labors ceaselessly to anoint Mank has sexually pure -- he's never tempted by the blandishments of Marion Davies, for instance.  Instead, he remains completely true to his wife who has the thankless role of appearing now and then on the other end of phone conversations.)  A penultimate scene in which Hearst tells a little parable to Mank about an organ grinder's monkey who thought that he was the captain of his fate seems to imitate Welles' predilection for speeches of this kind -- for instance, the fable of the frog and the scorpion in Mr. Arkadin.  But the story is a complete non sequitur:  Mank, in fact, proves it wrong in that he "fights" for his authorship of the script and ends up with an Oscar.  So what's the point of the picturesque fable? 

The film's dialogue is heavily laden with expository information.  It's as if the witticisms are all footnoted so that we know generally what's going on -- the film supposedly makes us privy to the "inside baseball" in early 1940's Hollywood and so information is constantly being spoonfed to the film's viewers.  This results in most of the dialogue sounding strangely pedantic and unconvincing.  Someone says something and, then, we get a quick Cliff's Notes exegesis of what was spoken.  The movie contains scenes that are inexplicably geared to movie cognoscenti -- for instance, we see L.B. Mayer punching Erich von Stroheim because the director had audacity to say to Mayer, a good family man, that he thought his own mother (von Stroheim's) was a whore.  This scene is presented to us, but not explained -- I assume that most viewers will have no idea what is going on.  (It's not helped by the fact that the actor who gets slugged looks nothing like von Stroheim.) The picture is full of references to cinema history:  we see Charlie Chaplin, Irving Thalberg, Norma Shearer, and little Shirley Temple even has a line.  (Where is Rin-Tin-Tin or the Lone Ranger's horse?)  Some showy sequences -- for instance, L.B. Mayer demanding that all his stars take a 50% decrease in wages because of the Depression -- are striking but they go nowhere.  (I think the scene is supposed to illustrate the depths of the Depression that the heroic Upton Sinclair is trying to combat -- but showing wealthy movie stars being a little less wealthy is an odd way to make this point.)

Mank  is an ambitious film and viewers will have to make up their own mind about whether it succeeds.  I thought the movie was airless and contrived, a disappointment, but, of course, I approach films from a perspective different from most casual viewers.  And, perhaps, there is something in this picture that eludes me.  My criticism is that the picture is fundamentally phony.  At a couple of points, the black and white film flashes a reel-change signal in the upper right hand of the screen -- this is ostentatiously done.  But I presume the movie is digital in every respect and this signal intended for an imaginary yeomen-projectionist laboring in some imaginary booth in a theater somewhere is as fake, as phony, as everything else in this picture.