David Fincher’s biopic of Citizen Kane co-author Herman Mankiewicz honors the legacy of its subject.
By: Jeremy Fassler
In the 1941 film Citizen Kane, Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) says to one of his newspapermen, “You provide the prose poems, I’ll provide the war.” As the film’s director, star and co-author, Welles provided “the war” in its look and mood, but as critic Pauline Kael argued in her 1971 essay “Raising Kane,” it was his co-author — Herman “Mank” Mankiewicz — who provided the “prose poems.” While David Fincher, whose biopic of Mankiewicz, Mank, comes out in theaters on November 13, may have distanced himself from Kael, he too reclaims Mank’s legacy as one of Hollywood’s greatest wisecrackers: a court jester with a heart of gold.
Mank, which stars Gary Oldman, cuts back and forth between the 1930s (when he first came to Hollywood) and 1940, when he went to Victorville, a small town outside of California’s Mojave Desert, to produce the first draft of Citizen Kane. He became famous not just for contributing to some of that era’s classic films, such as Dinner at Eight and Duck Soup, but for his legendary wit that made him a welcome guest at dinner parties hosted by the biggest power brokers in the country, including MGM CEO L.B. Mayer (Arliss Howard) and newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance).
The film places Mank in the pantheon of early screenwriters — such as George S. Kaufman, Ben Hecht, and Charles MacArthur (all of whom appear in the film) — who migrated from New York to Hollywood when movies learned to talk. Like Mank, these men had no pretensions of making “art.” But through the films they wrote, the men invented a new American vernacular: the wisecrack. Critic Ethan Mordden calls this genre a “uniquely American form of humor…to empower the powerless,” and it’s why their films still entertain contemporary audiences: the gangsters of Scarface, the chorus girls of 42nd Street, and the Marx Brothers all use humor to highlight life’s absurdities and live another day.
Mank, who imagines himself as a modern-day Don Quixote, sees the value in his and his colleagues’ work, even when he knows that his bosses favor bloated “prestige pictures” over genre films. Hearst himself produced several films starring his mistress, actress Marion Davies (played excellently by Amanda Seyfried), but he wasted her comedic gifts on corny melodramas. By contrast, when Davies raves over 42nd Street at one of Hearst’s parties, all the men scoff at what they perceive as her low taste — except for Mank. “Are you ever serious?” his assistant asks him towards the film’s end. “Only about something funny,” he replies.
Numerous books and films have been written about how Mank and Welles made Hearst the basis for Kane, but Mank is less about how he became their subject, and more about why. The film posits that while Mank relished his invitations to Hearst’s Northern California mansion, San Simeon, the two men had a falling-out after Hearst, along with Mayer, made the decision to run a smear campaign against novelist and California Governor candidate, Democrat Upton Sinclair. The campaign was one of the nastiest ever run, involving fraudulent newsreels and radio ads claiming Sinclair would turn the Golden State into communist Russia. Sinclair went on to lose in a landslide to Republican candidate Frank Merriam. Mank offends Hearst and Mayer not only by supporting Sinclair, but by appearing at San Simeon unannounced and by launching into a drunken tirade against them — after which he’s thrown out.
It’s a testament to the strength of the screenplay that this subplot doesn’t feel squeezed in as a “response” to outgoing President Donald Trump. In fact, it was written more than 20 years ago by Fincher’s late father Jack, and would have been relevant had it been made during the Clinton impeachment, or the buildup to the Iraq War — both moments in our history when media companies walked a thin line between reporting and propaganda.
However large the gubernatorial campaign looms over the film, it is still only one piece in the puzzle of Mank’s life. The film is honest about his vices: alcoholism, womanizing, gambling — and of course, writing a film that many fear will just be a two-hour trolling of Hearst. There is no better actor to play Mank than Oldman, who built a career portraying men who struggle to keep their devils at bay, most famously in his breakout performance as punk rocker Sid Vicious in Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy. Oldman’s work here is superb: he never allows himself to fall into self-pity or bathos, two very easy traps when playing A) an alcoholic, B) a screenwriter, and C) both. He plays Mank as a man with a hard outer shell and a big heart, which comes out whether by providing a friendly ear to Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried), or by helping his German maid and her family escape the Nazis.
In one scene, in which Mank — lain up with a broken ankle — dictates the script of Kane, he composes what Welles later called “the best damn thing in the movie”: the scene where Kane’s friend Walter Bernstein reminisces over seeing a girl with a white parasol. “I only saw her for one second,” he says. “She didn’t see me at all. But I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.”
Welles understood that Mank’s use of language not only empowered the powerless, but helped them to find value in their own lives. It should come as no surprise then, that prior to Kane, Mank did an uncredited rewrite of the Kansas scenes in The Wizard of Oz, giving Dorothy a home she could return to while he prepared to yank young Charles Foster Kane permanently away from his own. And Fincher, in bringing both his father’s and Mank’s words to life, has come home too.
Bio: Jeremy Fassler is a student at Columbia Journalism School. Bylines: The Daily Banter (staff writer), New York Magazine, Rogerebert.com, Bklyner. Was on Jeopardy! once and led the whole game only to lose because Final Jeopardy was insanely hard. He/him/his
