Mank

Mank is the ultimate double edged sword movie. What is a double edged sword movie, you ask? It's the kind where every positive aspect has a negative aspect that stands in perfect opposition. Everything you love about a movie comes with a price that makes what you love feel poisoned. Mank does that up and down its run time. Mank is the story of Herman J. Mankiewicz (played by Gary Oldman), the writer behind Citizen Kane. The movie chronicles his life over a period of several years and how a number of events and relationships led to his writing what would be his masterpiece and Orson Welles' most defining movie. Nice and simple, right? Well, here's the thing, and it's monkey paw issue #1. The story of the making of Citizen Kane is a fascinating one, with machinations and maneuverings both within Hollywood and outside of it. It is the kind palace-intrigue story that shows like House Of Cards and Game Of Thrones wish they could be as effective as. It never gets tiring to see the seedy underbelly of Old Hollywood (not that it's better now, but it was a different animal then). The problem is, it's also well-trodden ground. RKO 281 already covered much of the story; the troubled and hurried writing period, RKO Studio's difficulty staying afloat, Orson Welles being a Hollywood outsider, an effort to buy and bury the movie by William Randolph Hearst via MGM trying to buy RKO. What more can be said by focusing strictly on the life of the screenwriter? As it turns out, not much. His viewpoint does not exactly brighten a previously darkened corner. Then there's the actual direction of the movie. Director David Fincher underscores the Old Hollywood feel by shooting this not only in black and white, but using a lot of old-style camera movements and blocking and shots, like this was some kind of Cecil B. Demille epic. Visually, it is a lush, intoxicating movie. He even adds little touches like the cue spot in the upper right corner that would be on movie reels to let the projectionist know when to switch reels. But he also shoots the entire movie in a widescreen aspect ratio, uses digital photography, and even uses some CGI to clean up or touch up certain aspects, like ... the sky. I don't get why Fincher would only partially commit to this, but it makes the attempts at giving this an old movie feeling come off as half baked at best. Then there's the cast. Gary Oldman in the lead is never a bad thing. Charles Dance as the antagonist is never a bad thing. Amanda Seyfried and Lily Collins in supporting roles, I'm here for it. The supporting cast are all fantastic, even if they're not readily familiar. Hell, Bill Nye, of all people, has a cameo and it's as notorious expose author and professional rabble-rouser (in a good way) Upton Sinclair. There is not a bad member of the cast ... but then you notice that, outside of Oldman, almost nobody gets a bone with meat on it. Lily Collins is a put-upon assistant, helping Mank with dictation and typing while he recovers from a broken leg. Her role is mostly doing that, and fretting over his alcoholism. Dance plays William Randolph Hearst, but for being the omnipresent shadow hanging over the production, he's barely seen, and only has two scenes of note in a 2 hour and 15 minute movie. Seyfriend probably has the most to do out of anybody not named Gary Oldman, but she's Hearst's girlfriend and per project in Hollywood (and a sort of platonic girlfriend to Mank), so she's mostly there to react to others. Tuppence Middleton, Mank's put-upon wife Sara, is there just to be exasperated at things. Yes, this movie is about Mank, so Oldman's gonna get the most material, but it's like an 75/15/10 split, where the 75 goes to Oldman, 15 to Seyfried, and 10 split among the rest. And then there's the way the narrative is told. Perhaps recognizing that the movie, told in an A-to-B-to-C manner, would be as dull as dishwater, so he emulates Citizen Kane and tells it in a fractured manner, jumping back and forth over a period of ten years as the narrative warrants a flashback. It never felt disjointed or hard to follow, and the flashbacks always tie to what either just happened or what will happen in the "present day" of the movie. The problem with that is that this isn't an homage, it feels like a shameless cribbing of someone else's style, and maybe even an "ain't we clever?" move by making the story of Citizen Kane's author told like CK. Worse, it feels like a crutch, because without it, this story simply would not work. It barely holds attention as is, but without the time jumping, this would be nigh on unwatchable. And finally, we come to the aesthetic of the movie itself. Seeing Old Hollywood through the eyes of Mank. I always love a sneak peek behind the curtain, and this has plenty of it. The studio wheelings and dealings. The gross chauvinism (one scene has a guy with a secretary with big boobs who is taking dictation topless save for pasties with tassels, and it is totally believable that that would've happened). The entanglement with politics at the time. The old boy network. But ... we know all that. We've seen all that, in dozens of other movies. Worse still is this movie's commitment to roping in all sorts of names at the time, and doing a piss-poor job of introducing them. The average person may not know Irving Thalberg, or David O. Selznick, or Upton Sinclair. Hell, the movie barely establishes the connective tissue between Hearst and Marion Davies (Seyfried). The blizzard of names this movie throws at the viewer will baffle all but the most ardent of historians. This leaves Mank in an awkward position. It has the cast, the look, and the style, but it also suffers from a confused direction, a meandering script, and a bar that might be too high for most viewers to clear. Mank isn't a bad movie. It's a movie that was made with a lot of heart, but the heart and brain weren't in sync here. It ends up as an incredibly shallow movie about one of the most thought-provoking and complex movies to ever come out.