Well, after the travesty I sat through for my last review, I think I’ve earned myself a break. I’ve spent the last few days chasing after Netflix features by filmmakers I had a presumption I could trust for quality to no avail, so I’m gonna hedge my bets on someone I don’t believe, but know, can deliver: David Fincher. Music video director turned auteur cynic extraordinaire, even if I’m not endlessly devoted to every one of his films, I can never deny that the man has a control of the medium that few others can lay claim to. Which is why his latest, a look into the writing process of what is widely considered the greatest film of all time, is also something that few others would be able to accomplish with this level of sheer brilliance.
Gary Oldman plays the title role, that of Citizen Kane co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz, as the kind of person who would write a 320-page screenplay just to call someone an unloved man-child. The sheer wit on display is through the roof, putting me in a slight case of writer’s envy (as evidenced by how this review will turn out, I can already tell), and Oldman’s sloshed sardonicism flies right off his tongue like so much unutilised booze. The cast around him is equally excellent, like Amanda Seyfried as starlet Marion Davies, Arliss Howard as film magnate Louis B. Mayer, and a captivating turn from Charles Dance as William Randolph Hearst, news kingpin and future grandfather of bank-robber-cum-John-Waters-regular Patty Hearst.
I don’t want to sound like a broken record already, but seriously, we need to get into the staggering film craft on display here. Wholly embracing its period setting within every inch of the production, everything from the camera work to the cigarette burns (a detail most of my generation only knows about because of David Fincher, incidentally) to the scene transitions to the rear-projected car scenes to the soundtrack… holy shit, I don’t think I have ever been more impressed with the work of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross than I was with this. The way they channel contemporaneous jazz and swing gave me chills in a way only Alan Silvestri has managed in the past, and even adding a few industrial touches like incorporating the click-clack of a typewriter into the instrumentation. All of a sudden, them being picked to soundtrack Disney’s Soul makes all the sense: These dudes are more versatile than I ever gave them credit for.
There are, however, two glaring diversions from that period detail, at least to my eyes. The first being the use of CGI to re-create the animals on Hearst’s estate. Don’t get me wrong, I understand the need for such things logistically, but putting a man on stilts and calling it a giraffe would have been less conspicuous than what’s shown here. The other, however, is far more deliberate and serves a greater purpose: As a film all about what went into the words of Citizen Kane, the cinematography follows suit, particularly in the use of deep focus, a technique often attributed as Gregg Toland’s creation for CK. Such a statement would annoy pioneers like D.W. Griffith from beyond the grave, but then again, thoughts like that only serve to encourage me.
The mingling of cinematic life and real life is also in-step with CK’s genesis as a thinly-veiled critique of Hearst himself, and it’s in that idea that this stops being just a simple biopic and becomes something far grander. While the endless quips make the film’s slow pace more than bearable (I will never tire of hearing about Marion showing her Flatbush), the guts of the script provided by David’s late father Jack (with the odd punch-up from Eric Roth) delves deep into the intersection of film and politics. Y’know, that thing certain critics keep insisting is a new invention, not wanting to admit the role the Gerasimov Institute played in what film looks like to this day.
It is here that Fincher’s trademark cynicism goes into full gallop, as his vision of the cinema industry is one entirely at the whim of financial and political interests. Studio-funded and produced propaganda masked as news reels, screening in Hitler’s Germany maintained for the sake of its sizeable market (so long as no Jewish names appear in the credits), not to mention Hearst’s own monetary influence on basically every form of media at the time. And in the middle of it all is Mank, a drunkard who was boxed into writing a script that he was then ‘convinced’ had to be destroyed, eventually fighting with Welles himself over the credit for the best thing he’d ever written. Much like the Coen brothers’ own retro tribute, Hail Caesar!, the mistreatment of writers is at the forefront of the lens.
And yet, within that cold depiction of a heartless industry, Fincher ends up showing his hand. In order to believe that film only exists to sway public opinion and drive people towards a certain cause, you must believe that film has the power to do so in the first place. You must believe that, along with being able to fabricate reality, it also has the power to convey reality, albeit coated in a razor-thin layer of artistic license. You must believe that one man, armed only with a typewriter and an abused liver, is able to write something so close to the truth that it outlived the person it sought to expose. In essence, in order to have this cynical a view of cinema, it paradoxically requires a certain idealism in what it’s capable of.
This is a film all about the inner politics of the film industry and how much influence it has on various aspects of society, using the techniques of the past to take the audience right into the heart of Old Hollywood. And it turns out to be little different to the industry of today, right up to a bizarre bit of synchronicity when a studio head worries about how he’s going to get people to sit in a cinema. But it’s far from bleak. The note it ends on isn’t one of sorrow, but hope. That even though the industry involves so much under-handed BS, the artists fuelling it are still standing. The art is still standing. And maybe, just maybe, Orson Welles managed to make his Don Quixote movie after all.
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