Review: "Mank" is a Distracting Messy Homage

Scene from Mank

No matter who you are, there's a good chance somebody at least once has told you that Citizen Kane is one of the greatest movies ever made. The mythology surrounding it has only ballooned in the near 80 years since its release, finding director Orson Welles being considered a filmmaking pioneer who took down Hearst with this swift commentary of greed and corruption. While history has been favorable, there are those like director David Fincher who want to posit that Welles wasn't the mastermind behind this story. There was one man in particular named Herman J. Mankiewicz - a studio savant who navigated the studio system in the 1930s before making this screenplay that changed the world. 

It's a juicy enough hook for Fincher to apply his familiar hostile view of humanity to. After all, who doesn't love an underdog story, where history can be rewritten to immortalize the real heroes? The issue with Mank isn't so much what it intends to achieve, but that it does so in a bit of a clumsy way. Based on a screenplay written by his father Jack Fincher, it's a story that glamorizes early Hollywood with endless references and pastiches that help to explore the "movie magic" concept. However, there's little else going on here that feels essential. For a story about writing a universally acclaimed hit, it sure lacks the payoff that could make this into a modern masterpiece. It's a bit of a misfire, finding Fincher giving too much into sentimentalism that clouds his technique, keeping the story from ever meeting its full potential.

The First "Mank" Trailer Reshapes the Narrative Around "Citizen Kane"

Scene from Mank (2020)

If you ask anyone to rattle off a list of the best movies ever made, there is a good chance that Orson Welles' 1941 film Citizen Kane will be on that list. For reasons that I don't need to get into, it has been praised and reassessed for almost 80 years, finding new audiences appreciating the craft that goes into telling a compelling story about a tycoon. Even if there's plenty of great stories behind its making, one has to ask if there's anything worth making an entire movie out of. 

Apparently on that list is David Fincher, making his cinematic return for the first time since Gone Girl. With one of the few major Fall releases still on the docket, Mank looks to be a period piece that captures the dark drama in full detail, making you understand the pain and sacrifice that goes into making cinema. It's a story of the screenwriter, Herman L. Mankiewicz, and his battle to get recognition for his script. While this sounds like Oscar-bait on its surface, Fincher's increasingly proficient, technologically-groundbreaking works don't take these stories lightly. One has to wonder what drew him to this story. If nothing else, the first official trailer looks to promise one of the most visually astounding works of 2020, if not the Citizen Kane (some pun intended) of recent Hollywood biopics.