You’re not writing an opera.
But I am writing an opera.
Well, he’s done it again. David Fincher has turned in another masterpiece. I was pretty mixed on Gone Girl, so mixed that I admit it hadn’t even really registered just how long we’d gone without a new Fincher film. Well, I thought, he’s coming back with a real high-wire act and Mank, shot in glorious black-and-white, a glamorous tale of Old Hollywood and classic cinematic icons, is a triumph.
My praise for the movie just really has to start with Gary Oldman. It seems to me that the Academy often gives people “career” Oscars for weak performances only for the performer in question to blindside them with a genuinely great performance in just the next couple of years. That definitely happened here. Oldman unjustly took home an Oscar for his mostly bad work in Darkest Hour, but now, with Mank, he’s turned in a performance that is genuinely one of his best. For an actor of Oldman’s caliber to turn in a performance that really might be his best nearly forty years into his career is astounding, but this is one of his most finely calibrated performance, a performance that’s really about finding the weary, cynical, often nasty, unhappy and ultimately brilliant soul of his character. And it’s a character that we need to believe is capable of writing Citizen Kane; and, by the end, we do believe it.
He’s ably supported by a brilliant cast. Top marks must go to Amanda Seyfried as Marion Davies; she’s an actor I’ve found a bit overrated in prior films, but she’s finally given a truly great performance. She’s convincing as Davies the star and as Davies the person and she’s iconic to boot. Though look at those eyes! Somebody write a Bette Davis biopic stat! Ferdinand Kingsley, an actor I can’t recall seeing before, gives an excellent performance as a particularly villainous Irving Thalberg and Jamie McShane brings heart and emotional weight to his performance as would-be director who finds himself in over his head when he gets pulled into the big politics of the movie studios. I mean, that’s where I’m stopping because they kind of elevate themselves above the ensemble in my opinion and if you give everybody in the ensemble who deserves it a sentence, the review is longer than the movie. Tom Pelphrey, Charles Dance, Tuppence Middleton, Lily Collins, Arliss Howard & Sam Troughton are all excellent as well; and where else can we end but at Tom Burke’s uncanny, magnificent, larger-than-life performance as Orson Welles?
I guess that brings us to the meat of the matter, but I honestly don’t find the movie to be all that ax-grindy when it comes to “setting the record straight” on the writing of Citizen Kane. The movie isn’t a hatchet job on Orson Welles. Hell, it’s not even, as, by the way, Citizen Kane also isn’t, a hatchet job on William Randolph Hearst! The movie affords even Hearst, a despicable character certainly, a moment or two of empathy or, at least, of humanity. But the screenplay, by Jack Fincher, director David’s father, is ultimately both about invoking Kane and also echoing it and that’s why it ultimately works. It’s a fantastic Russian doll for movie buffs, but ultimately it is, like Kane, a story about a flawed man and the regrets he’s built over his life. One could say that this gorgeously photographed movie is about the rot at the heart of the studio system and the political systems of the time, but also, of course, of today. The political elements of the script were surprising to me and they brought what could have been a fun “spot the trivia reference” game to life for me. The movie is somehow both a beautiful evocation of a kind of dream-past, tinted by nostalgia, and a gripping piece of subversive political action that feels completely up to date and of the moment. At the end of the day, Fincher’s done more here than re-litigate the creation of Citizen Kane; he’s re-crossed some of the same ground crossed by Kane, the terrain of a man’s identity. What makes a man who he is? His failures, his flaws, his regrets, his brilliance? Mank is like Kane, a man defined by oppositions; I kept thinking as I watched the movie that Mank is often the most insightful guy in the room yet he’s also a man profoundly defined by his own massive blind-spots, all of which relate to himself. He understands everything about the world except where he fits in it. If that ain’t tragedy, it’ll do for now. 4 stars.
tl;dr – brilliant lead performance by Oldman anchors smart, layered screenplay and leads an excellent ensemble; a magical, brilliant, challenging tragedy is another masterwork by Fincher. 4 stars.