58 Time November 23, 2020
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MOVIES
The man who wrote
Citizen Kane, laid bare
By Stephanie Zacharek
T
he legend of orson Welles is a folk song
with many stanzas and no end. He was a ge-
nius and a tyrant, a young rogue who either
maximized or squandered his talent, depend-
ing on whom you talk to, an imperious figure who, in his
last years, gained too much weight and had to peddle
wine on TV commercials to make some dough. Welles
and the movie that made him, 1941’s Citizen Kane, are the
stuff of lore. But Kane wouldn’t be Kane without Herman
J. Mankiewicz, the man who co-wrote—or possibly even
just wrote—its script, almost without getting credit.
A great wit, raconteur, heavy drinker and gambler,
Mankiewicz deserves his own wry, sardonic ballad,
served up with a double shot. If only more people
actually remembered, or cared, who he was.
David Fincher cares. With his new feature Mank, he’s
made a movie that revels in an era when journalists, nov-
elists and playwrights flocked to Hollywood to make big
money, sometimes screwing up their lives even in the face
of their great good fortune. Mank is a clever and enter-
taining feat of old-Hollywood hagiography, rendered in
pearlescent black and white that mimics the look of films
from Mankiewicz’s own lost era. It’s a detail that’s espe-
cially poignant since most people will end up watching
Mank on comparatively small screens, at home. (It was
produced by Netflix.)
But the story Fincher tells here—in a picture that rev-
els in both beauty and ruin more than any other he’s made,
from Se7en to The Social Network—is intimate enough to
resonate even on that smaller canvas. It’s about carving out
a grand piece of work that nearly kills you, about betraying
people you care about for the sake of art, about the degree
to which the people holding the purse strings also hold the
power. And it is, above all, a movie made with love, and
not just for the long-vanished early days of a flickering art
form: the screenplay was written by Jack Fincher, a jour-
nalist and the director’s father, who died in 2003. Fincher
has been wanting to make this movie for years, and al-
though it’s based on real events, there’s an aura of ghostly
dreaminess about it too. It’s as if Fincher were trying not
to re-create the past but to communicate with it.
Gary Oldman—pale, puffy and whiskery—plays Mank,
a longtime studio screenwriter and producer and former
theater critic who’s fallen on hard times. As the movie
opens, he’s suffered a car accident that puts him in a cast,
rendering him nearly immobile. He can still write, though,
and luckily, he’s been hired by Welles (played by English
actor Tom Burke, and seen only briefly) to come up with a
screenplay. RKO Pictures has given the brash young direc-
tor carte blanche to make any movie he wants, with any
collaborator, and Mank is his guy. Welles arranges for the
sozzled genius to be wheeled off to a
remote ranch in Victorville, Calif., not
just to allow him to recover from his
smashup, but also to keep him off the
sauce—for a little while, at least.
With the exception of booze, Mank
has everything he needs to get to work.
Welles has set him up with a pretty
English secretary adept at dictation
(she’s played by Lily Collins, who bears
a shimmering resemblance to 1940s
star Jennifer Jones), and has installed
a persnickety babysitter in the form
of John Houseman, Welles’ loyal the-
ater compatriot and a producer on
the then nascent film (played by Sam
Troughton). And so Mank starts writing
a dense and complex story that’s some-
thing like Mank itself, an odyssey that
weaves from the present to the recent
and not-so-recent past, in a decidedly
nonlinear fashion.
Fincher touches on Mankiewicz’s
tenure as an unruly but brilliant writer
at Paramount, and traces his encoun-
ters with figures like bullish studio boss
Louis B. Mayer and his more principled
right-hand man Irving Thalberg ( Arliss
Howard and Ferdinand Kingsley). Most△
Gary Oldman, Sean
Persaud and a crew
member make old-
school movie magic
on the set of Mank