Oscar Countdown: Mank

Mank is a complex, busy,  peculiar, and largely unsatisfying work that once again underscores the fact that it's difficult to make a good film about a drunk. Why? Because a drunk tends to rely on the forbearance of everyone around him. They know him, perhaps they love him a little, they're willing to indulge him. But we don't know him, and we find him tiresome. "Get a grip on yourself," we say. "On what grounds do you deserve our sympathy and attention?"

One answer might be, "Because I'm in the process of writing the screenplay for the greatest film of all time." But the screenwriter himself wouldn't know that. He only knows that he's got to finish the script in sixty days, and considering his health, it might be the last one he ever writes, and it had better be good, because none of his earlier scripts were good.

 That is the basic premise of Mank. The central character, screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, delivers bon mots that aren't witty, exudes a charm that isn't charming, and cultivates a "I could have been a contender" self-pity that means nothing to us, because we have no idea who or what he might have become, had he laid off the booze and done some real work. Howard Hawks would have done it differently.   

Meanwhile, the film abounds in technical issues. The black-and-white cinematography is meticulous and dazzling to a fault. The result is that everything looks a little too dark, or too bright, or too creamy, and all the wonderful period details distract our attention from both the characters and the story. We're being asked to look too many ways at once.

Compounding the problem, the voices seem to have been post-synched in an echo chamber. Why?

Herman Mankiewicz is best known today as the co-author, with Orson Welles, of the screenplay for Citizen Kane. Viewers who haven't seen that film—which I suspect are legion in this day and age—are likely to be even more confused than the rest of us. Citizen Kane is a thinly disguised and less than flattering biopic based on the life of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, though it also draws upon the somewhat larger-than-life braggadocio of Welles himself, who not only directed the film but also plays the lead.

Mankiewicz evidently knew Hearst well, and, to judge from flashbacks scattered throughout the film, he was invited to quite a few parties out at Hearst's palatial estate, San Simeon, on the central California coast. He also knew the ins and outs of the Hollywood studios, having written scripts for several of them. In one scene Mank introduces his brother (who later became a distinguished film director) to his brilliant writing buddies—a coterie that includes Ben Hecht and S. J. Perelman—and we're instantly wishing we could spend some time with them rather than with the boozy and existentially desperate Mank himself.

Because it lacks a sympathetic central character, Mark has a hard time getting us interested in its two central tropes. The first is that Mankiewicz, rather than Welles, ought to be given credit for the enduring appeal of Citizen Kane. Very few buy that theory today. The second is that Mank, no doubt a decent and lovable man underneath it all, inadvertently gave producer Irving Thalberg the idea for how to swing the California gubernatorial election in 1934, robbing socialist Upton Sinclair of the victory. The film even goes so far as to suggest that in his idealistic youth Hearst himself might have supported Sinclair.

Whether this is true or not, it's not the kind of thing that excites movie-goers today.

A single scene might serve to illustrate both the complexity and the vagueness of Mank. An old pal comes up to him at the studio and asks Mank for a dollar. Mank turns to the policeman standing behind him and asks him for a dollar. The policeman obliges. Mank gives the dollar to his old pal. I suppose this is supposed to suggest that people on the set are fond of Mank, and feel comfortable both asking him for things and giving him the things he asks for. But why didn't Mark give the guy a dollar from his own pocket? The scene isn't funny. What, precisely, are we supposed to make of it?

Some of the most touching scenes in the film involve conversations between Mank and Hearse's girlfriend Marion Davies. She looks glamorous but comes across as sweet and intelligent—far more appealing than the shrill character Mank wrote into Citizen Kane. Mank feels bad about this, and tries to convince his old friend, who has read the script, that her character as portrayed in the film isn't really how he thinks about her. Well then, why did he write it like that?

Even this cursory review ought to give you an idea how much thought went into the making of Mank. Too much of that thought, I'm afraid, has been devoted to incidentals--allusions to minutia of film history and California politics--and not enough about emotional ballast. In the end, the character of Mankiewicz himself hardly emerges from the realm of maudlin cliché. Long before the end of the film, some viewers may be gripped by the inexplicable desire to revisit that unparalleled cinema dynamo from three-quarters of a century ago, Citizen Kane.