“Mank” Was Everything I Hate About Films About Classic Hollywood
By: Dr. Thomas J. West Iii
Tags: Film, Culture, Film Reviews, Movies, Movie Review

“Mank” Was Everything I Hate About Films About Classic Hollywood

I went into David Fincher’s new film Mank with high expectations. I’m generally a sucker for a film set in classic Hollywood. I love the way that many filmmakers are able to capture a little bit of the magic of that period of filmmaking, and I especially enjoy watching contemporary stars transform into their counterparts of yore. This being the case, I though I would really love this film, in the same way that I had Trumbo and Ryan Murphy’s television series Hollywood.

Unfortunately, Mank ended up being everything I hate about films about Hollywood: self-indulgent, too clever by half, and empty of anything of substance.

Starring Gary Oldman in the title role, it’s essentially an old-style biopic. As the film begins, Mank has been commissioned by the boy-wonder Orson Welles (Tom Burke) to work on a script for the film that will become Citizen Kane. Given that it ends up becoming a thinly-veiled commentary on newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance), the film devotes considerable time to flashbacks that explore Mank’s relationship with the old man and especially with his mistress, Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried). While he ultimately wins an Oscar for writing, he has to share the credit with Welles, a bitter pill for the proud Mank.

It’s pretty clear from the get-go that Mank intends to be a biopic in the style of old Hollywood. As the character himself says as he begins to work on the script for Citizen Kane, “You cannot capture a man’s entire life in two hours. All you can hope is to leave the impression of one.” Unfortunately for Mank, and for the film as a whole, it really doesn’t manage to do that.

It’s certainly not for lack of trying. The film is beautiful, there’s no question about that. The black-and-white cinematography is a strong choice, and it helps to capture the aura of 1930s and 1940s Hollywood filmmaking. The dialogue crackles with intensity, intelligence, and wit, which is again a fitting homage to the cinema of the period. And, of course, the performances are extraordinary. Though some have taken issue with Oldman’s casting as being age-inappropriate (since he’s in his 60s and Mank was in his 40s at the time of the film), alcoholism takes a terrible toll on a body, so that didn’t really bother me. Amanda Seyfried is radiant as Marion Davies, and Charles Dance (as he always is) is truly extraordinary, if criminally underused, as William Randolph Hearst.

Unfortunately, all of these strengths can’t make up for the fundamental deficiencies that afflict this film from the beginning to the end.

At the level of storytelling, for example, Mank is something of a mess. As a viewer, I quickly grow impatient with multiple flashbacks for, unlike in reading a book — where you can keep track of switches in time relatively easily — it’s hard to keep multiple points in time in your head while watching a film, and it’s even harder to see how they relate to one another. In this case, all of the flashbacks just seem to blur into one another, so that it’s very difficult to see the relationship between the past and the present in any sort of coherent fashion, other than the general antagonism and betrayal that Mank feels toward Hearst. However, Dance’s Hearst is given far too little screen time for his role in Mank’s life to feel genuine or authentic, and the same is true of Davies. It’s clear what they’re supposed to signify, but they end up falling flat because the story fails them.

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with a film like Mank. It seems to be laboring under the assumption that, because of its subject (the writer of one of the most influential films in the history of Hollywood) and its external trappings (the black-and-white cinematography, the performances), that it can get away with cheap and lazy storytelling. It is, essentially, the same rage-against-the-machine fetishization of the auteur, though here the writer than the director, that we have seen time and time again. In this universe, it’s male creatives that matter, while the women, including Mank’s long-suffering yet eternally-supportive wife Sara— who he, and everyone else, refer to dismissively as “Poor Sara” — are given second, third, and fourth billing. In essence, they’re little more than window-dressing to the titanic conflict between male egos, whether that’s between Mank and the blustering and cruel Louis B. Mayer (who’s little more than a caricature) or between and Welles (whose final confrontation about screenwriting credit is one of the worst scenes in the entire film).

Normally, I’m not in the habit of taking a film to task for not being the film that I wanted to see made, but I’m going to do so in this instance, because I do think it’s unfortunate that Hollywood, with some notable exceptions, continues to produce these kinds of stories. Did we really need another tale of old Hollywood focusing almost exclusively on men, their conflicts with one another, their dick-measuring contests? Did we really need another film about a male artist struggling against the system? Did we really need this story when there are so many others about marginalized people and groups that we could have had? Where’s the biopic about renowned costume designer Edith Head? Where are the biopics about Dorothy Arnzer and Ida Lupino, female directors who struggled to find success in the all-male world of Hollywood? For that matter, where’s the biopic about struggling queer stars such as Farley Granger and Tab Hunter? These are stories that could be told, but instead we’re subjected to the same masturbatory male fantasies as always, with the added daddy-issue complex that the idea for the film apparently was Fincher’s father’s.

Perhaps had Mank not so slavishly tried to replicate the ethos and look of classic Hollywood biopics, it would have succeeded. As it is, it can but be a pale shadow of those great films old, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.