David Fincher's 'Mank' Is Gorgeously Mounted But Ultimately Distant Biopic [Review]

My friend, the film critic, noted “Netflixpert” and Playlist contributor, Charles Bramesco, once summarized the conundrum of Netflix original films thus: “It’s where great filmmakers go to make their worst film.” This is, to be clear, not an airtight theory (and obviously subjective); for every few “Hold the Dark”s or “Land of Steady Habits”es, you can find a “Da 5 Bloods” or “Marriage Story” to effectively counter. But the underlying point stands. The streaming service’s much-noted hands-off production process seems to allow filmmakers absolute freedom to make exactly the film that they want—for better, and for worse—and as a result of this unintentional wheat-from-the-chaff separation, we end up with a fairly clear picture of who are the true geniuses, and who needs a bit more of a guiding hand. In this unpredictable year, few things have surprised this viewer more than discovering David Fincher may belong to the latter category.

As is often the case with Netflix originals by filmmakers of note (think “Roma” and “The Irishman”), Fincher’s “Mank” is a deeply personal project, and one he’s spent years trying to get made. His late father Jack penned the screenplay, and the subject is one near and dear to the filmmaker: movies. His focal point is Herman Mankiewicz, the legendary screenwriter of the early talkie era who would co-write (or just plain write, some contend) Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane,” sharing in that legendary film’s only Oscar victory.

“Mank” (played with relish by Gary Oldman) is a hard-living, hard-drinking studio scribe, as good at the typewriter as he is bad with his bosses. We first meet him in 1940, as he and Welles’s producing partner John Houseman (an appropriately fussy Sam Troughton) arrive at the desert hideaway that Mank will uses as both a writing retreat and a dry-out; he has 60 days to bang out a draft of what he will initially call “American,” for some much-needed cash and no screen credit, with the assistance of lightning-fast transcriptionist and typist named Rita Alexander (Lily Collins).

But there’s nothing terribly exciting about watching someone write, even when it’s a half-sober Gary Oldman in traction, so Fincher flashes back to 1930. A legendary telegram (“Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots”) brings Mank’s writer pal Charlie Lederer (Joseph Cross) out to Paramount Pictures, to join the New York literary wits who are making a killing writing dialogue for the still new (and still novel) talking pictures. Lederer repays his friend by inviting him for a weekend at San Simeon, the remote playground for the rich where newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance) lives with his mistress, the movie star Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried).

Davies is Lederer’s cousin, so he makes introductions; Mank’s rapier wit and effortless contrarianism make him a San Simeon regular. All of this comes into play a decade later, because Hearst was the basis for Charles Forster Kane, and “Citizen Kane” was, among its many descriptions, a thinly veiled roman à clef. And thus, the elder Fincher’s screenplay non-linearly shuttles to and fro from the writing of the script in 1940 to the events of Hollywood that led Mank to write it in a way that often feels like tangents: the establishment of the Writers Guild, the contentious gubernatorial campaign of Upton Sinclair, and Mank’s torching of his important relationships with the powerful movie moguls Irving Thalberg (Ferdinand Kingsley), Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard), and finally, with Hearst himself.

Though a good two decades too old for the role, Oldman is good— very, very good, carrying the weight of this man’s demons and gifts with every step and stumble, lacing his impatience and regret through every line reading. The performance serves as a welcome reminder of the electricity of his ‘80s and ‘90s work (and of what made his Oscar-winning turn as Churchill so starchy and artificial). Seyfried makes a fabulous Davies, beautifully conveying the character’s wit, intelligence, and savvy self-awareness; her duets with Oldman are among the picture’s highlights, as these two seemingly mismatched actors find the rhythm and screwball snap of their dialogue, and explore the complexity of this unusual relationship.

Fincher’s script is wildly uneven, however, but when it hits, it really hits; the razzing and one-upmanship of that murderer’s row of Paramount writers could sustain a film of its own, L.B. Mayer’s hard-boiled walk-and-talk explainer of where and how he feels emotion is a magnificent marriage of writing and acting. Lastly, the long, busy, post-dinner cocktail chat in the sitting room of San Simeon feels like something future film students will study —the blocking, camera, and cutting are dizzyingly precise, without suffocating the funny, provocative freedom of the dialogue.

In fact, “Mank” is often a joy just to look at, from the crispness of the black and white images to the dances of light and shadow in the cinematography (the director of photography is Erik Messerschmidt, who shot Fincher’s Netflix series “Mindhunter”; the vintage throwback sound, booming, crackly dialogue, is outstanding too). But the look and feel of the film is also baffling —if Fincher is attempting to recreate “Citizen Kane,” which, y’know, seems like what he’s trying to do, when why is it shot in the ultra-wide 2.20:1 aspect ratio, rather than Kane’s 1.37:1 Academy ratio? Why is, does he shoot digitally, on the Red Monstro Monochrome, rather than 35mm, giving the picture an unmistakable (and sometimes unfortunate) digital sheen? (I’m sure there are more depressing phrases than “CGI-ed cigarette burns,” but I can’t think of any right now.) Fincher has perfected a distinct and unmistakable visual style in the quarter-century since “Seven.” However, in choosing to jettison it without fully embracing a throwback aesthetic (as, for example, Steven Soderbergh did in “The Good German”), he ends up with an unsuccessful stylistic hybrid— a Frankenstein monster that never gets out of the lab.

Those stylistic departures really clang since, at least initially, the structural similarities are so striking. In “Mank,” Houseman describes the “Kane” screenplay as “a bit of a jumble… a collection of fragments that leap around like Mexican jumping beans,” worrying that “the story is so scattered, the audience will need a road map.” Early on, “Mank” seems to ape that playful, non-linear structure, but as it continues, it becomes clear that no road maps are needed, as nothing nearly so ambitious is at play. They’re not borrowing the Kane structure at all— they’re just slamming between two timelines, with increasing frequency and frustration, and by the end, it feels like a little gimmicky. Like the black and white, the structure is only homage if you don’t think about it for too long.

There are other fumbles as well: wheezy sidebars with Mank’s wife and his secretary that are barely worth the effort, a big drunken breakdown that turns into the kind of embarrassingly on-the-nose nonsense that the worst biopics traffic in freely. It’s all terribly disappointing, because this thing should’ve been catnip for a viewer like yours truly (Welles fanatic, “Raising Kane” apologist, classic Hollywood student, “You Must Remember This” subscriber). There is some pleasure in spotting the winks and legends and shout-outs. Still, as with any biopic, of any figure, you can’t just bank on familiarity— you have to give the unfamiliar viewer (and, considering the platform it’s on, there will be many) reasons to care. By the end of “Mank,” even I wasn’t sure any of this mattered all that much. [C+]