“Mank” is the biggest cinematic waste of 2020
1 out of 5 stars
If Charlie Kaufman’s “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” was the most disappointing Netflix exclusive of the year, then David Fincher’s “Mank” is the most bizarrely bad. It is an unnecessary and overlong act of reverse nepotism; a clueless director resurrecting his bad screenwriter papa’s script in a depressingly amateur-hour attempt to make people believe Jack Fincher was an unsung master. By putting complete trust in his father’s vision for the story of the inception of Orson Welles’ legendary “Citizen Kane,” Fincher throws millions of dollars into the trash so he can take a limp stab at a director who was more original on his worst day than Fincher ever will be on his best.
Unlike the majority of the cinephile population (and I don’t say this to cheaply stray from the herd in an attempt to seem unique), I’ve never seen a trace of Kubrick, Hitchcock, or any of the other masters in David Fincher. I think his greatest strength is his diversity, but he doesn’t have a voice. If you take the thematic consistencies of his directorial choices to represent his artistic statements, then the text you end up with is edgy for edgy’s sake, and that’s all the text you’ll get out of him, as Fincher has never written a feature film (more on this later). The tones of “Se7en” and “Fight Club,” which people for some reason still claim are his best movies, sound like cheap college-football-bleacher-pothead nihilism, taking breaks from Nietzsche to cough about Marx despite never having read either. Neither film is bad, but they aren’t significant moments in storytelling, and nobody from the Fincher clan is an important storyteller.
At Fincher’s best, he is directing multi-layered epics grounded in a reality that’s impossible to ignore or make dull, like “Zodiac” and “The Social Network.” He really is a producer’s jackpot of a director, opting for stuff that sells and seems like a surefire good idea to invest years of time and focus into. He pulls 75% of these films off with class and a directing style that seems more intricate than it really is (watch any YouTuber essayist’s dissection of Fincher’s style, write what they say down on paper and actually read, syllable-for-syllable, what they’re trying to explain is so special about this guy. It’s maddening nonsense what holiness people see in him). The most frustrating thing to me about Fincher is that, because he bides his time for years between projects, people act like every frame of his new films are laboriously carved masterpieces.
Yeah, not quite.
The real story, for all that it actually counts, is that Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles wrote what was for decades considered by the cinematic world (as represented by the annual “Sight & Sound” polls) the greatest movie of all time. And indeed, today, anybody who watches it — despite the occasional outsider’s attempts to dispel its undeniable cast — agrees that there are few films that reach the Mount Olympus “Citizen Kane” resides upon.
But starting with Pauline Kael’s sort-of-kind-of conspiracy theory that the origins of the controversial yet beautiful story could be credited to one man and one man only (Herman Mankiewicz, known in Fincher’s world as “Mank” and played by Gary Oldman), the ship of Charles Foster Kane’s status has always been on the verge of sinking with the weight of its gossip rather than buoyed by the fact it’s one of the best movies ever. This is my long-winded way of saying I stepped into this film with a heaping ton of skepticism because, well, who cares who wrote it? All the key figures involved with its production got ample credit, yet the film at hand acts as though tipsy Mank was being shoveled into the ether by Welles who, despite his tender age during “Kane’s” production, was capable of writing most of the known world under the table.
But I’m all for revisionist history. James Ellroy’s “American Tabloid” is my favorite novel, so bring it on. But the focus about the Welles v. Mank authorship is so left-field that it actually threatens to send viewers away with a critically wrong impression of both men. It takes up less than 20 minutes of screentime, barely a subplot, whereas the rest of the film purports to be about how the newspaper mogul of the early 20th century, William Randolph Hearst, went all mob-bossy on Mank for writing a movie that supposedly dedicated the famous sled to Marion Davies’ vagina. What starts as potentially sinister ends up, like so much else in this film, anticlimactically damp and ineffectual. Nobody actually does anything to anybody in this film. Nobody gets touched, threatened, accused, brought down-or-up; we leave the film with everything in the same place it was before we knocked. This movie is too quaint to exist.
None of this movie is as edgy or lurid as its real-life interests warrant. Charles Dance, who plays Hearst (and, par for the course of the rest of the movie’s casting, looks nothing like him) has less than five minutes of actual screen presence. The central performance, Gary Oldman as Mank (which, from the trailer’s editing, is for some reason being touted as Oscar caliber), doesn’t give nearly enough to deserve anything close to an Oscar, not even the far opposite Razzie (which in and of themselves are embarrassing). I’m not sure anybody knew exactly why they were doing this movie; maybe because Fincher was at the helm despite the fact he’s never actually won an Oscar or done anything except give actors a migraine with his juvenile attempts at Kubrickian filmmaking, making actors lose their minds repeating takes hundreds of times.
To acknowledge reality for a second, there are many Fincher acolytes who are calling this movie a masterpiece. I’m sure they have their reasons, and I’m sure there’s plenty that would surprise and challenge me. But I think this is all a fog-sized war and just as easily moved through. Like, think of when you listen or watch a reunion for one of your favorite programs or movies and are shocked to find the actors aren’t playing your favorite characters, but themselves, and they’re depressingly distanced from the work. It’s impossible to imagine anybody involved with this movie ten or more years down the line acknowledging it as their hooking-the-moon moment. Everything we might argue now about “Mank” already doesn’t matter. Even the people who say they love this movie won’t remember it when they’re at the gates of deciding their all-time favorites.
Gary Oldman has already given the two best performances of his career: as John Le Carre’s George Smiley in the 2011 adaptation of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” and his Oscar winning role as Winston Churchill in the excellent “Darkest Hour” (2017). You don’t see any actual stretching going on here. Oldman gives the same imitation of a drunk any of us could, and even worse, Jack Fincher’s screenplay never allows him to be a mean drunk, instead opting for him to be a kindly, grandfatherly drunk (despite only being in his 40s, whereas Oldman is in his 60s). The one interesting thing about the trailer is that it makes you think “Mank” will be an unflinching look at a washed up writer’s spiral into an alcoholism so inescapable it killed him (a rot only described in text by the closing credits), but there are no real consequences in the movie for Mankiewicz’s alcoholism. Actually, it only encourages it, displaying alcohol as Mankiewicz’s only resource for masterful writing. To neglect the real-life disease and its devastating effects even further, the people in Herman’s periphery are more than happy to enable him. Why? Because they love the old rascal, cirrhotic warts and all.
As much as David and Jack Fincher want to convince you a story is here, there really isn’t. I can tell you about things like a boring subplot involving a director who willingly makes propaganda, who we’re supposed to feel bad for, but it’s not worth it. I can describe Amanda Seyfried’s torturous impression of a Transatlantic accent, but that’s not worth it. I can even let you in on the single undeniably solid part of the movie — the ominous, yet devotionally classic score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross — but that might make you want to watch the movie, so again, it’s not worth it.
This is Netflix scratching Fincher’s back for all the work he’s done for their original programming, but the real reason this movie didn’t find a home on the big screen despite supposedly being decades in the making is that even the most cynical of Hollywood producers must have known it wasn’t worth it. That the material didn’t justify a 2-plus-hour running time; that the requisite huge cast and crew necessary for a black and white, painstakingly authentic period piece wouldn’t pay off; and finally, that both lifelong cinephiles and casual moviegoers wouldn’t stretch to remember a film like this past the brief point of pitifully patting David Fincher on the back for saying his daddy was cool. There have been and will be worse movies to come out this year, but for sheer undeserved stature and embarrassing amount of effort, “Mank” is the biggest cinematic waste of 2020.