Image via Netflix
Writer-director David Fincher (The Fight Club) claims that with Mank, his film about screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz and the authorship of Citizen Kane, he wasn’t making “a movie about a posthumous credit arbitration.” But in the end, that’s the impression made by his film. Mank shows Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) with legs in a cast after an auto accident, slowly dictating his masterpiece to his secretary. He sneaks a drink when no one’s looking and brushes off—as much as an immobilized man can—the busy attentions of the script editor John Houseman (Sam Troghton). Mankiewicz complains that the plummy-voiced Englishman “makes everyone speak like a constipated Oxford don.” If so, not one word of Houseman’s made it into Citizen Kane.
All of this would be of only academic interest if not for Citizen Kane’s decades-long standing as America’s greatest film, the work of Orson Welles, a boy wonder with no previous experience in Hollywood. Although Welles and Mankiewicz shared credit for the Oscar-winning screenplay, controversy was aroused in 1971 by critic Pauline Kael, who famously asserted that Welles deserved little credit for writing the one film that remained his universally-recognized magnum opus. The war over its authorship had begun and Mank—made for and streaming on Netflix—is only the latest skirmish.
Fincher’s historical fiction accurately measures the man at the heart of the story. Oldman is brilliantly understated in the role, playing Mankiewicz as perpetually disheveled and disgruntled, the guy who wanders uninvited onto a movie set at noon with a drink in his hand. He may have been numbing the pain of being born too late; he might have been a lion of letters in the age of Oscar Wilde. Now he was one in a cohort of New York intellectuals sharpening their wits against dull surfaces of screenplays marketed to rubes. At least that’s how many of them felt about their well-paid if unsatisfying labor.
Drawing from a reservoir of bitterness, Oldman’s Mankiewicz lashes out in his Citizen Kane screenplay against friends and benefactors, notably actress Marion Davies (acted without caricature by Amanda Seyfried) and dangerously, media baron William Randolph Hearst (Chares Dance). Both were mercilessly lampooned in Citizen Kane’s first draft. Even after numerous rewrites, the resemblance of Kane’s characters to their real-life models remained clear enough.
Fincher filmed Mank in black and white, approximating though not fully achieving the deep-focus cinematography of Citizen Kane through digital technology. His screenplay for Mank loops around Mankiewicz’s professional life, not unlike the way Citizen Kane presents Charles Foster Kane and his hapless mistress in discrete segments. Fincher arranges details from Mankiewicz’s life with the care of a mosaic artist assembling a picture from fragments. The drunken Mankiewicz really did throw up at parties, as shown in a scene at Hearst’s castle. And looking up from his vomit, he once actually said, “It’s all right. I brought up the white wine with the fish.”
Mankiewicz’s refusal to curb his tongue and conceal his contempt made him, as in Mank, a Hollywood leper. If anything, Fincher conceals the extent of his subject’s bull-headed contrarianism. By the time he wrote the first draft of Citizen Kane, his career was washed up. Welles—seldom seen in Mank but brilliantly voiced by Tom Burke—tapped Mankiewicz from their collaboration with the Mercury Theater radio series.
If Fincher errs historically, it’s in Mank’s closing scene, which drives home the argument that Citizen Kane’s authorship was largely Mankiewicz’s. Reality, as usual, is too complicated for any neat categorization. Who thought of Citizen Kane? Who knows? Mankiewicz wrote the first draft (as shown) and worked through all stages of the screenplay’s development, but the script benefitted from Houseman’s interventions, from contributions snatched from many hands and—especially—from Welles’ larger vision. Thanks to Welles, Citizen Kane isn’t simply a brilliantly bitter portrait gallery of fools but a tragedy on a Shakespearean scale.
