A Life Fragmented: The Cinnamon Rolls and Mosaiced Pieces of “Mank” and “Citizen Kane”
A couple weeks ago, I was lucky enough to get to go and see David Fincher’s new film Mank, an adaptation of his late father Jack’s screenplay about the co-writer of the seminal Citizen Kane. As many who know me will surely be aware, Mank was among my most anticipated films of the year, and indeed it is now also my favorite film of 2020. It’s a deeply idiosyncratic period film, crafted with dazzling technical prowess and one that’s sure to delight anyone who loved Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood’s backlot scenes and also the exact type of work I expect many may be put off by. Mank is niche, and it is rarely, if ever, focused on a single thing. To put it another way, it’s a story where several niche points of interest are delicately layered on top of each other and interlinked, and such intricacy is bound to be polarizing or seem sloppy or unfocused. Even many who admire its construction may be left a bit cold if they don’t fully buy into its ambitious aims.
Much like Citizen Kane, Mank really is an exploration of a single character. In this case it’s a biopic, so naturally it will remind many of Fincher’s efforts on his 2010s doorbuster, The Social Network and possibly also The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which while a fictional character study, follows a lot of traditional biopic plot beats. The Fincher film it most reminds me of is my personal favorite, Zodiac, and that’s because in telling the story of a man’s life, it recognizes it must broaden its focus. Zodiac, technically, is also a biopic, but that’s really a secondary quality to being a noir-style thriller and a procedural. I tend to think of it as a movie about adaptation, a story which patiently demonstrates the limitations of journalism and police work and then finally examines how a civilian writer acts as an adapter who can fill in the blanks and create the version of the story which lives in the public consciousness.
As a biopic, Mank, like Zodiac, tells the story of just such an adapter. Many who see the film will be surprised to learn the movie really isn’t about Citizen Kane. It’s about that film’s writer, the many places he took inspiration for the Oscar winning screenplay, and the way those inspirational experiences shaped his craft and emphasized the importance of using his gifts in service of the people. Among the aforementioned niche interests covered in Mank is the California gubenatorial bid of author and muckraker Upton Sinclair, which is a vital piece of the film’s puzzle. I was myself shocked at how political Mank was, easily Fincher’s most charged work in that regard, and given the connection to his own father, it also feels like the most personal. I found myself particularly moved by this story of an artist finding a social purpose for his work in the process of coming up with his best creative idea.
In many ways the basic arc of Mank is the title character’s transformation from work-a-day craftsman into an activist, faithful of the value of artistic expression. As Hollywood period pictures go, that thesis is one of the most captivating, a simultaneous rejection of the exploitative system and embrace of its inherent power. In the film, a movie studio (by Mank’s own ironic recommendation) crafts a political smear ad, gesturing at entertainment’s growing role in the political world and underscoring the vitality of Mank’s personal transformation.
What really crackles about this work for me, however, particularly as a film keen on gesturing at Citizen Kane, is that structurally it is somewhat enigmatic. Already people have criticized it either for not letting scenes play out or lacking a clearly defined focus or shape to its story. If this is a film about Mank’s political awakening, wouldn’t it make more sense to see it chronologically? To see its dramatic moments, all of its history breathe? And in some ways I find these valid questions. As a lover of the movie, of Zodiac, of the tremendous 2019 Netflix release The Irishman, I’d gladly watch a three hour cut of Mank. But as its title character says while writing his script, you can’t capture a life in two hours (or three, or four) but instead you can give the impression of it.
One of the most striking pieces of visual metaphor in Citizen Kane, a formally brilliant film filled to the brim with such sights, is that of the unfinished puzzle. Indeed in the last scene one of the men who has been investigating Kane holds a box of puzzle pieces, suggesting that what has been mined from Kane’s life, his acquaintances and his memories are simply fragments. They have collected disconnected chunks of a man, and all they can hope to do is assemble them. Citizen Kane is a film famous for flashback, and it is composed almost entirely of fragmented glimpses into the life of Charles Foster Kane and those closest to him. It subtly suggests an unreliability, because only having the pieces leaves Foster feeling ambiguous. Can you ever know a man? Or can you truly only get an impression?
Mank is constructed around this same principle, liberally borrowing Citizen Kane’s elliptical storytelling structure, weaving the viewer in and out of Mank’s life loosely tying together the pieces that make his most famous work and also his own psyche. The structure is similar to Gerwig’s Little Women adapation, only without the friendly color composition changes to help the viewer find their place in time. Instead Fincher asks you to follow along as he unravels his cinnamon roll, taking in its details, history and lessons in a fluid and nonlinear stream.
It’s an unconventional approach, but one that is magnificently suited to the making of Citizen Kane, itself a wildly ambitious piece of screenwriting and filmmaking. It also allows for the film’s brilliant technical qualities to shine. It’s understandable to feel as though some scenes in this rapidfire edit have their impact blunted, but to me again it suggests an attempt not to tell the story of a man, but give an impression of him. And that impression impressed me tremendously. I hope it’s a sign of things to come from the forthcoming Fincher and Netflix partnership, and I hope future Fincher projects are as idiosyncratic and personal. As Mank suggests, reaching for the stars often yields the best work from extremely talented craftsman, particularly if it means something to them.
