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The protagonists of the classic drama were not alcoholics, as far as we know, so any attempt to frame Herman J. Mankiewicz’s life as a Greek tragedy would have missed a few drinks on a doctoral thesis. Mankiewicz was certainly a victim of arrogance – as well as being a screenwriter, bon vivant, drunk epic and now the subject of David Fincher’s “Mank” – but his pride was aflame and Scotch-unleashed. Had he not written the script for “Citizen Kane,” he might have ended up in the ash heap of film history, along with the small crowd of other transplanted New York wits and drinkers who made 1930s Hollywood comedy a smart thing. . , past beauty.
There is no way not to see “Mank” as a story of self-destruction and professional suicide.
To insinuate here that Mankiewicz wrote himself what is often considered the best screenplay ever produced in Hollywood means buying in bulk Fincher’s version of the “Citizen Kane” story, a story that seems to have been raised in its entirety by the long discredited of Pauline Kael “Raising Kane”, a 50,000-word essay written as a preface The 1971 Citizen Kane book. The legendary New Yorker film critic took the position that Mankiewicz was solely responsible for the script, with little assistance from the film’s presiding genius, Orson Welles, who never sued Kael but could have done so had he not had enough problems – plus Kael’s almost slanderous and seemingly plagiarized assessment of his legacy.
However, as Fincher obviously knows, it’s a better story to have the title character a lone hero waging an artistic war against moral philistines. (The screenplay is attributed to the director’s late father, Jack, who died in 2003.) They range from Welles himself (Tom Burke) to MGM’s rude Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard) to, of course, William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance ), the newspaper tycoon upon which Charles Foster Kane was modeled so venomously. In addition to reading Kael’s piece, as it offers a lot that is relevant to people and places, what a viewer of “Mank” should be aware of is its success not only as a film about a film, or even the making of a film. , but on the mechanics of cinema and storytelling.
Mankiewicz was certainly a victim of hubris, but his pride was aflame and aroused by scotch.
This is revealed not only in the way Fincher uses Erik Messerschmidt’s black and white cinematography to evoke Gregg Toland’s moody work on “Kane”, or in the hints we hear from Bernard Hermann’s original score, but in the way he which “Mank intentionally defies the stereotypical treatment of the human condition that was beginning to take over and neutralize the kind of directing that Mankiewicz and his companions had advocated in the 1930s – complicated people’s stories of often questionable judgment.
Which describes Mankiewicz himself, of course. Mank is sympathetic, as is Kane, otherwise none of their films would have been watchable. But there’s no way, even with the kind of panache bestowed on Mankiewicz by the perpetually brilliant Gary Oldman, not to see “Mank” as a story of self-destruction, professional suicide and, again, arrogance. Appropriately enough, “Mank”, like “Kane”, swings back and forth in time. The present is represented by the writer’s work on the script for “Kane,” holed up at Mrs. Campbell’s Guest Ranch in Victorville, California, 65 miles from Los Angeles with a leg in a cast and not enough alcohol.
He takes his liquor and is allowed to drink it – despite protests from his very appropriate British secretary / typist, real-life Rita Alexander (Lily Collins) – through the intercession of his nurse, Frieda. He reveals, to Rita’s amazement, that Mank saved Frieda and her entire village by paying for their escape from Nazi Germany. Is it a true story? I couldn’t find references to it, but again, this is a movie and as far as narrative goes, it’s definitely one that redeems our habitually caustic hero.
Elsewhere “Mank” traces various episodes from the subject’s happy days in Hollywood, where he was surrounded by other Algonquin Round Table wits and an industry too vulgar not to attract their contempt – something Mankiewicz doesn’t bother to hide. This doesn’t give him much hope, of course. But that’s the thing that should make him heroic. He does, even if the portrait painted by “Mank” also makes him mean, vindictive, something of an intellectual bully and a boy in love with his own sense of humor. This doesn’t make it conventional. But it certainly makes it real.
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