How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the “Mank”
Does a truly Great Movie really require two viewing to appreciate?
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Every year I feel like I have to write this same intro, about a movie that has been hyped for months on end as the “best movie of the year!” The expectation gets inflated to the point that nothing could possibly satisfy, leaving half of viewers attacking the hype and the other half defending it.
Somewhere in that maelstrom lies Mank, the fantasy of a cinephile’s mad lib. David Fincher directing a script written by his late father about old Hollywood and the making of Citizen Kane? Nothing below the quality of, well, Citizen Kane could possibly suffice.
Still, after a year both in life and at the movies that left us little to get excited about, I dove into the hype head first. I rewatched Citizen Kane, caught up on the discourse surrounding the essay “Raising Kane” (I’ll provide a primer in a second), and on Friday night I put up my phone and turned down the lights to simulate a theatrical experience.
When the credits rolled two hours later, I was….confused. The movie truly felt like the fourth episode of a six episode mini-series, as if there was some crucial backstory I’d missed. I was engaged the whole time, woo-d by the transportation into 1930s moviemaking complete with tinny audio and cigarette burn effects on the “film.” But it felt like an inside joke that I wasn’t quite in on, packed with at least a half dozen side plots and a dozen important characters.
Fundamentally, the movie wasn’t about what I thought it was going to be about. Legendary critic Pauline Kael wrote “Raising Kane” to prove (falsely) that the man who deserves credit for Citizen Kane is Herman J. Mankiewicz, a.k.a. “Mank,” who wrote the initial script, rather than director/producer/star Orson Welles (the essay spawned dozens of rebuttals). The two squared off in a brutal battle for screenwriting credit, all while newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst and his crony Louis B. Mayer tried to stop the movie from being made.
Those events come up in Mank, but they are not what the movie is about. I couldn’t get the movie out of my head, so I began reading reviews, listening to podcasts, and checking out this Q&A Fincher did with Vulture’s Mark Harris.
Every single one of those sources relayed the message that they too had been puzzled by their first viewing of Mank, but upon second viewing had unlocked the movie’s true genius.
On Wednesday, I dutifully gave Mank its second chance. And despite my skepticism, those critics and podcasters were proven correct.
Mank is one of the very best movies of the year, an interlocking, multi-layered storytelling masterwork about the authorship not just of one screenplay but the authorship of one’s own life.
The skeleton key to unlock the story is the “parable of the organ grinder’s monkey,” first mentioned yet unexplained by Mank midway through the movie, allowing for the explanation to serve quite literally as the movie’s climax.
In short, the parable describes a monkey plucked from the jungle and dressed in jewels, touring from town to town with an organist who plays music while the monkey dances. The monkey, seeing the crowds he draws every time he dances, assumes that he must hold all of the value and power in the relationship. He doesn’t realize that he is beholden to the organist, and the minute he stops dancing he will be cast aside and another monkey will take his place.
Hearst tells Mank this story to imply that Mank is the monkey, and the only power he has is given to him by his employer, MGM Studios, and its boss, Louis. B. Mayer. But Mayer is also the monkey because Hearst bankrolls his operation (and half of Mank’s contract). Mank then writes a thinly veiled takedown of Hearst, Citizen Kane, to prove that Hearst is in fact the monkey. And Welles is also the monkey for making the movie powered by Mank’s script.
They are, in fact, ALL monkeys, co-dependent on each other. Their real power comes from collaboration with each other, no matter how reluctant they are to do so. That collaboration can result in positive outcomes, like the making of the greatest movie ever made, or negative outcomes, like the fixing of the 1934 gubernatorial race of California.
That race for governor is center stage in Mank, and perhaps its most timely addition. Both in the movie and in real life Hearst and Mayer created “fake news” movie reels to dissuade the public against neo-socialist candidate Upton Sinclair (in the movie, the idea is first proposed in a wise crack by Mank himself).
The thing I didn’t pick up on in the first watch, which is explained during Mank’s climactic drunken speech, is that a young Hearst once vowed that he himself would bring about the socialist revolution (a claim conveyed publicly by none other than Upton Sinclair). When Hearst’s own candidacy for governor failed, primarily because voters failed to love him the way he longed for, he retreated into his ivory tower (quite literally) and ultimately decided to destroy Sinclair, the people’s champ who became everything Hearst wanted to be.
If you were able to follow that explanation, you were hopefully rewarded with the same glorious “aha!” moment I had on my second viewing, opening up a deep well of appreciation for the brilliance of both Mank and Citizen Kane.
Still, I’m not sure what it says about a “Great Movie” that it must be watched two times in order to comprehend it. The pace of the movie is patient, and the structure is non-linear, “like a cinnamon roll” Mank says, jumping back and forth in time just as Citizen Kane did some 80 years prior.
Whatever headiness and pacing that persist on the macro level, moment to moment the movie floats along to a sensational period score and is guided hand-in-hand by truly sensational performances from Gary Oldman and Amanda Seyfried. Seyfried is a massive favorite to win an Oscar for her portrayal of Marion Davies, Hearst’s young bride, and Oldman’s fast-talking drunken buffoon would be a shoe-in had he not just won a couple years ago for his portrayal of Winston Churchill (keep in mind, these awards are not merit-based).
Seeing as its the only major Oscar movie to be released in 2020, this movie has received the full brunt of the annual awards backlash, in this case focused around film bros who don’t appreciate anything less than a saintly portrayal of their lord and savior Orson Wells, here played admirably but inadequately by Tom Burke.
As I once said in defense of Stanley Kubrick, the value of art can be measured by its ability to inspire and then defend itself against close inspection and scrutiny. The reason why Citizen Kane is the most worthy candidate to carry the preposterous title of “greatest film ever made” is the nearly 80 years of discourse it has generated and stood up against.
Put Mank to the test. Twice. See if doesn’t become one of your favorite movies of 2020. I dare you.
