Mank

David Fincher’s Hollywood story is the most Oscar-baiting movie. His subject, based on a script by his father, is the writing of the celebrated Citizen Kane by the ‘washed up’ and defiantly left-wing writer Herman J Mankiewicz.

This isn’t the first time a Director has gone to black and white in order to win an Academy Award, but it’s almost certain that Stephen Spielberg wasn’t being tricksy—even though he was accused of that a lot for inserting colour into his film to highlight a point.

And it’s weird that watching Mank, this retro movie-fest, that the mind goes to Schindler’s List, which only came to mind because it was recently pointed out that this film is very light and flighty in its depiction of life in Germany before the reality of what’s happening it made evident to the protagonist. And of course the style of the period was very much created by those who left Europe to set up in Hollywood even if they were of the left.

So the film is full of dark shadows and angled beams of bright light. It’s a black and white film—shot in 8K digital. But initially it just looks like it was shot digitally and not in colour. Mank (Gary Oldman) is sequestered in a house to dry out, and the film takes this primary time-line showing his incarceration with a mission to write the script for Orson Welles (Tom Burke). Welles has been given a unique contract: he can write any film he wants and have the final say on every aspect of it. That’s how we got Citizen Kane, a film that’s for ages been regarded as the best ever made, and which as some contemporary resonance in Fincher’s film because it deals with the decline of a massively powerful figure whose influence can be lampooned by a young director in his twenties. Mank is involved in the left-wing politics of Upton Sinclair’s campaign to become Governor of California in 1934, which sets him against right-wing political figures in Hollywood like studio boss Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard). At the same time he is in William Randolph Hearst’s circle (Hearst played by Charles Dance) and befriends Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried)—here portrayed as ethereally lovely, especially since she is thought to be an inspiration for Charles Foster Kane’s second wife.

You do really need to have seen Kane to get a lot out of this movie, to make it more of a substantial experience, otherwise it’s good for the style and performance: Seyfried really is good and Tuppence Middleton has a small role as Mrs Mankiewicz which is quite fun in places. Lily Collins plays the secretary who’s employed to transcribe Mank’s dictated screenplay.

There are loads of films about Orson Welles and a few about Citizen Kane as well as the great movie itself, which is portentous and enjoyable. Fincher eases into replicating a Golden Age movie but the 8K digital print just looks too shiny alongside his stylistic experiments. And Gary Oldman’s drunk act at one point recalls his cameo in Friends: “Is that my arse?”