Early in Mank (David Fincher, 2020), an MGM producer asks “who was that?” as the titular Herman “Mank” Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) waltzes through his set with the know-it-all arrogance of Sherlock Holmes. “Just a writer” is his lackey’s dismissive reply. Mank is a glamourous, precise and stylistically overwhelming piece of film from start to finish, but at its heart this is a simple, human tragedy about the thanklessness of being a cog in the machine. Fincher is ruthless in tearing down the mechanisms behind Hollywood’s artistic output, building on a script penned by his own father, Jack Fincher, who in life had been a largely unsuccessful screenwriter, to pose a devastating and certainly relevant question for today’s Marveltopia: is it possible to find individuality in an industry so thoroughly and cynically operated by committee?
The film is based on a true story, following Mank, an overweight, abrasive man with an impressive intellect and little desire to use it. In a similar vein to the most insufferable of arts students, Mank believes himself to be above the world of politics and economics, looking down on the common people who worry about such things from the comfort of a typewriter (or, more accurately as time passes, a bottle). At first, this paints the portrait of a shockingly selfish man, but as Mank slowly unravels its moral compass, we come to understand this as more of a survival technique. If Mank were ever to actually contest the right-wing politics of the people dominating his line of work, they would simply swat him aside like a pesky moth. In showbusiness, talent is irrelevant to the men calling the shots. Mank’s elitism is a performance; he can only prolong his inevitable destruction by allowing the nasty beliefs of his co-workers to go unchecked.
The film is told non-chronologically, meaning that a significant thread running throughout takes place long after Mank has finally fallen out of Hollywood’s favour for speaking his mind. As has already been marketed in some depth, this portion of the film takes place during the writing process of Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1940), with Welles himself appearing as an almost monolithic being played by Tom Burke. I am admittedly slightly curious to see how this storyline is received by a wider audience with a less passionate familiarity with film history, for while Mank’s personal journey is clear-cut and should strike a chord with anyone who has ever forced a smile to save face, the minutiae of Citizen Kane’s development as depicted in the film requires an acute knowledge of both the film and its reception to be optimally understood.
Regardless, it should be no surprise to anyone familiar with Fincher’s work that Mank is visually impeccable, flawlessly bringing to life a world which never really existed in the first place. In a sense, the film feels like an attempt to treat the rules and rhythms of a 1930s Hollywood film like their own reality, staying with its characters and following them home after the cameras might have cut away in a production at the time. The score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, who have been working consistently with Fincher since his opus The Social Network (2010), does a lot of the work here, switching between homages to the orchestral tones of the era in question and a more contemporary, thrilling score. The result is an environment that feels neither modern nor classical, rather something utterly unique. Though your mileage may vary on the story, the presentation of Mank is something new entirely.
Despite concerns prior to release that Mank might be a sterile experiment in technical filmmaking, it’s undeniable that the film has a lot of heart, even if finding it requires a lot of patience and the occasional google search. It is clear that Fincher, though characteristically meticulous in his engineering of the film’s look and feel, has taken a more hands-off approach to the story itself, fittingly allowing the words of his father to speak for themselves. There is an important statement in that process, particularly given the film’s subject matter, but I do wonder if it’ll have the impact it deserves parcelled away in a package as dense and inaccessible as this one. Still, it’s better than Benjamin Button (David Fincher, 2008), so that’s something anyway.
Mank is released in Irish cinemas on December 1, and will be available to stream on Netflix from December 4.
Photo Credit: MANK (2020)
Tom Burke as Orson Welles.
NETFLIX.
