JOHN NOLTE’S MANK REVIEW: Forgettable, Over-Produced Piece of Fake News.
The first 20 or so minutes are actually fun. The dialogue is sharp as we tour Hollywood’s true Golden Era. Tedium sets in pretty quickly, though. Eventually, the relentless witticisms only add to the artificiality of a movie that has so much black and white digital trickery you feel like you’re watching a videogame. Fincher might argue that “artificiality” is the idea. After all, look at the movies from that time, all shot on backlots. Fair enough, but those movies feel real because the backlots were real, in the sense they actually physically existed — which is a far cry from pixels.
Mank and [Citizen Kane co-screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz] are also selling us socialism. The eeeevil Mayer and Thalberg and Hearst are eeeevil Republicans who invent fake news (but only after Mank’s second-worst Forrest Gump moment accidentally gives them the idea) to stop Upton Sinclair, a socialist, from becoming California’s next governor.
“Communism spreads the poverty,” Mank claps back as he speaks-truth-to-power as a guest at Hearst Castle, “While socialism spreads the wealth.”
Talk about fake news.
But back to Welles…
The great hypocrisy in Mank is the tearing down of Orson Welles. Fincher (working from his late father’s screenplay) pretends to be bravely exposing the establishment as too powerful, too much of a monopoly (while working for Netflix LOL), but all he’s really doing is protecting it against renegades and true outsiders like Orson Welles who, for all his flaws, was an iconoclast, an artistic revolutionary, an anti-establishment maverick so far ahead of his time it would take Hollywood a half-century to catch up to Citizen Kane — and Mank still shits all over him, annihilates him, punishes him, and in favor of who? A studio hack. A man who was part of The System. An insider who dined with studio heads, who entertained at Hearst’s table, and who only sold all these people out after he had nothing to lose after he hit bottom.
Read the whole thing. The genius of Citizen Kane is that it was the only time Welles had both full creative control and a top-flight crew of veteran studio craftsmen to implement his innovative ideas. Mank’s screenplay was an important roadmap for laying out Welles’ then-radical experiments with structure and contrasting tones and points of view, but — at least according to Welles himself — the experiment in structure was Welles’ idea:
“I’d been nursing an old notion,” Welles told Bogdanovich, “the idea of telling the same thing several times—and showing exactly the same thing from wholly different points of view. Basically, the idea Rashomon used later on. Mank liked it, so we started searching for the man it was going to be about. Some big American figure—couldn’t be a politician, because you’d have to pinpoint him. Howard Hughes was the first idea. But we got pretty quickly to the press lords.”
Sadly, Mankiewicz’s desultory post-Kane career (he would die at age 55 after a lifetime of alcoholism), anticipated Welles’ own massive dissipation (via gluttony, cigar smoking, and drink) in his later years. As Nolte writes, “If you look closely, the Mank in Mank isn’t bravely biting the hands that feed him or speaking truth to power or risking it all. He isn’t risking anything. All he’s doing is what countless has-beens have done through the ages: dishing dirt on old friends, writing a tell-all because that’s all he’s got left to sell.”
Welles never wrote his own tell-all, but in order to makes ends meet, and raise money for films that never happened, in his last decade, Welles did an enormous amount of selling as well.