Mank

 

Gary Oldman and Herman J. Mankiewicz

 

 

             

Orson Welles in Citizen Kane, 1941

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Orson Welles on the set of Citizen Kane, 1941

MANK                        C                                                                                                                USA  (131 mi)  2020  ‘Scope  d:  David Fincher

This is a business where the buyer gets nothing for his money but a memory.  What he bought still belongs to the man who sold it.  That’s the real magic of the movies.                                     —Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard), co-founder of MGM

Among the most cynically cold films in the Fincher repertoire, making this dead on arrival, despite the interest in reviving unchartered territory, as there is literally no one in the entire picture worth caring about, becoming a glamorized caricature of what might have happened behind the scenes when movie moguls were changing the face of the industry, creating highly appealing spectacles of entertainment that eventually became part of the mainstream culture.  Despite the Hollywood implications, this is a wretchedly sad story about legendary screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman), older brother of Joseph L. Mankiewicz who wrote and directed the scathing account of Hollywood backstabbing in ALL ABOUT EVE (1950), revealing how alcoholism consumes a person and his entire career before eventually claiming his life, left with nothing but feeble notions, hallucinations, and delirious tremors that leave you a shattered figure of your former self.  While this hints at the truth behind the writing of CITIZEN KANE (1941), that becomes a mere afterthought in this film, as the man who would be king is king for a day, winning an Academy Award for screenwriting (shared with Orson Welles) before the industry turns its wicked wrath upon him and spits him out as yesterday’s news.  Among the more pitiful pictures in recent memory, a portrait of a sad and forlorn figure who is even sadder than the behemoth giant portrayed in the movie, the larger-than-life portrayal of Charles Foster Kane as William Randolph Hearst, influential newspaper publisher and media mogul.  Written by the director’s father Jack Fincher, a journalist who died in 2003,  (Mank (2020) - Transcript - Scraps from the loft), showing scant affection for Welles, as if still holding a grudge, becoming a poison pen letter to a corrupt Hollywood of the 30’s, a cesspool run by over-privileged business tycoons who cared only about lining their own pockets, where this film is seen as a feeble attempt to fight back against the powers that be, yet indulges in the miserably self-absorbed, continually glorifying the artifice, wallowing in its own pathetic cloud of inebriation, blind to the horrors of the Depression, instead providing a hollow yet glamorized view of the millionaire movie moguls that controlled the industry.  With the hyperliterate Mankiewicz a towering figure walking among them, engaging in witty repartee, known for his biting sarcasm and free-spirited love of drink and gab, even Hearst enjoyed his dazzling conversation, so he fits right into an industry overflowing with magisterial self-indulgence and wealth, pampered by all the pleasures money can bring.  When we see him holed up in the middle of the Mojave desert with a nurse and secretary recovering from injuries suffered in an automobile accident (his leg broken in three places), including provisions (alcohol laced with Seconal) fit for an army regiment, he’s essentially given 60 days to produce a screenplay for the first film of new Hollywood wunderkind Orson Welles, all under the supervision of John Houseman (Sam Troughton), with Mankiewicz dictating to his secretary Rita Alexander (Lily Collins) who then types up the manuscript.  While it’s slow going at first, as he’s not easy to warm up to, continually plying himself with alcohol, subject to blackouts, he quickly makes progress on what is easily the greatest thing he’s ever written, a sprawling epic work that examines the life of an American newspaper tycoon who becomes one of the richest and most influential men in America, yet behind the scenes is a different story, a punishing portrait of a wrenchingly lonely and isolated man, never seemingly satisfied with all his wealth and riches, told with flashbacks, becoming a collection of fragments compressed by time and space, and from multiple points of view, where the daring visual design is all Welles. According to Mankiewicz, “You cannot capture a man’s entire life in two hours, you can only hope to leave the impression of one.”

The script is subject to historical Hollywood controversy where there are questions of authorship, with film critic Pauline Kael writing a legendary New Yorker essay in 1971 entitled Raising Kane where she attributes Mankiewicz as the sole and exclusive author, suggesting Welles’ grandiose claim of co-authorship is a power play on his part, actively plotting to deprive him of any screen credit, contributing little, if any, to the actual writing.  Rebuffing Kael’s argument is longtime Welles friend and admirer Peter Bogdanovich, who published his own essay entitled The Kane Mutiny in a 1972 article for Esquire that point-by-point disputes Kael’s argument, suggesting her refusal to consult Welles lacked all principles of scholarship, resulting in egregious errors with blatant damage to his reputation.  With various other film critics chiming in, like Andrew Sarris, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and Joseph McBride, it appears relatively clear that Mankiewicz wrote the original draft by himself, yet signed a contract giving up any claim to credit, but then changed his mind, subject to various rewrites by Welles, who had complete freedom to make whatever he wanted, suggesting in the end it was a collaborative process, with both named as co-writers of the film.  For the most part, Fincher chose the version that gave the most credit to Mankiewicz and the least credit to Welles, who is barely onscreen and never seen writing a single word of the script.  After receiving a shared Oscar, Mankiewicz quipped, “I am very happy to accept this award in Mr. Welles’s absence because the script was written in Mr. Welles’s absence.”  Fincher’s film doesn’t go into any of those details, ignoring any backstory about how he was selected, fully absorbed in the writing of the original script, suggesting Mankiewicz was extremely proud of his work, but it got bogged down in lawsuits, which eventually affected not only the script but the commercial aspirations of the film, as it was effectively sabotaged at the box office by the movie moguls who at the time controlled what was shown in theaters, opening the door for Hollywood to undercut Welles’s ambition within the industry, targeted by the right-leaning Hearst organization, with the moguls viewing him with leftist contempt, destroying his ending to THE MAGNIFICENT ANDERSONS (1942) and reshooting a new ending, which officially ended any relationship Welles may have had with Hollywood, as he felt betrayed in every respect.  The Mankiewicz career trajectory was quite different, establishing his reputation in the 20’s and 30’s as a theater critic and Berlin war correspondent before becoming a script doctor in Hollywood, called upon to add spicy dialogue, offering splashes of humor, even helping shepherd in the new wave of German émigré’s fleeing the Nazi’s in Europe, including Fritz Lang in FURY (1936), helping him make the American transition to Hollywood by speaking fluent German.  His career ended by basically putting Welles on the map, but in doing so soured all his Hollywood connections, biting the hand that fed him, burning all his bridges in the industry, exemplified in a single bravura scene at the Hurst mansion, a costume dinner party at San Simeon where he shows up uninvited and completely plastered, a court jester standing up to power, going on a lengthy drunken outburst that is cringeworthy and will forever alienate him from anyone left in the business, but he does have the last word, unceremoniously vomiting at this ultra-lavish dinner party where he is eventually shown the door by the host.  If anything, Mankiewicz seems to have thrown his entire career away in continual episodes of bad taste, going on drinking binges where he performs the part of the buffoon, but in the end no one is laughing.

A pale comparison to Welles’ last film The Other Side of the Wind (2018), which is a behind-the-scenes look at some of the characters within the Welles theatrical troupe, exaggerated in all their pomp and glory, consumed by alcohol to the point of dysfunction, but Welles has so much more to offer than Fincher, whose film is strangulating in its own pretentiousness, creating an empty and meaningless experience.  Fincher tries to paint a portrait of Mank as a visionary, one that is hard to believe, as he was a man that seemingly admired both Hearst and Welles, and was just as much a maverick as Welles, with both rubbing elbows with the movie moguls, including Hearst (Charles Dance) along with his partner and muse, actress Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried), where the wealth and richesse of Hollywood was their social class during the Depression, surrounding themselves in pretense and self-indulgence.  In fact KANE and MANK cohabit many of the same spaces, but no clips are shown in the film, instead Fincher searches for the origins of the inventive screenplay by replaying various episodes in the life of Mankiewicz, a Hollywood insider with access to fame and fortune, but a gambling impulse left him perpetually in debt, who likely sees things quite differently than the millionaire class of moguls.  When the banks closed during the Depression, Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard) tearfully asks his employees to take a temporary 50 percent pay cut, promising to make his workers whole when the banks reopen, but of course, no repayment ever occurred.  Mankiewicz refused to join the Screen Writers Guild, believing unions were for suckers, but in this case the workers were certainly duped out of their salaries.  Like KANE, much of this film is told in flashbacks, making multiple diversions, becoming bogged down in the trappings of the movie industry, shot digitally in black and white by Erik Messerschmidt, including multiple scenes in near darkness, where Mankiewicz breaks from the political crassness when the industry becomes a walking advertisement for political shenanigans, becoming a voice of liberal dissent in a room full of conservative Republicans, drawing a parallel between the glorious ideals of Upton Sinclair, a muckraking novelist and an outspoken socialist who the industry slays into submission through discrediting negative advertisements that play in theaters across the state when he ran for Governor of California promising to end poverty, turning him into the bogeyman, but his valiant idealism isn’t so far removed from Hearst himself as a young novice trying to have an influence in reshaping the world, or for that matter the brash new visionary upstart in Orson Welles.  Pity that Hearst had to use all his power to destroy young ambition in its tracks, where a shattered idealism becomes intertwined with his own unfulfilled ambitions, leaving a giant void in the heart of the empire, where his castle-like estate is a collection of museum-like art pieces collected from around the globe, but does any of it hold any real meaning?  What this film lacks is what pervades throughout KANE, a personal perspective, an inner drive, something to cut through the emotional coldness and deep cynicism of Mankiewicz, whose openly hostile remarks are contentiously sarcastic and absurdly flippant, but instead Oldman delivers a performance that never convinces, continually uttering glorified phrases that sound nothing like how people really talk, lacking warmth and any real personal connection to anyone, at one point exclaiming “every moment of my life is treacherous.”  In stark contrast, the ingenious script for KANE is legendary, originating in such a desolate place in the middle of nowhere, creating something akin to a revolutionary work.  For Mankiewicz, the confessional tone of the screenplay he wrote was his ultimate expiation.  

Rules Don't Apply

RULES DON’T APPLY        C                   

USA  (126 mi)  2016  d:  Warren Beatty                    Official Site

A lighthearted Hollywood romance that aspires to be more, where Warren Beatty comes out of a 15-year absence to play the part of a doddering Howard Hughes near the twilight of his career, as he was making the transition from a semi-recluse in Los Angeles to a total recluse in Las Vegas.  Writing, directing, acting, and producing the film himself, after languishing on the shelf for a few years, you’d think there might be some new revelations about the character, but Beatty goes all ISHTAR (1987) on us, resorting to the same comic absurdity with which we are already quite familiar, where his stumbling eccentricities are key to understanding his overly flawed character, where you wonder how this guy could ever have earned a single dollar, much less a million and/or billion dollar empire, depending upon how much his wealth fluctuated.  The narcissistic view of himself is so over the top that you wonder if Beatty is making a comment on the Hollywood industry itself, where it thinks of itself exclusively at the expense of all other interests, remaining so out of touch with the real world that it’s only real invention is pure fantasy.  Since Hughes is known to us today as someone who went into hiding, where few ever had the chance to actually see him in his final days, it’s only natural that he remains hidden in the opening 30-minutes of the picture, where we hear about him, but never see him.  Instead the story revolves around one of the many rising starlets discovered by Hughes, flying them out to Hollywood, providing beautiful individual homes, maid service, and a private chauffeur taking them to a neverending litany of acting, singing, and dancing lessons, where all were steered into the dream of one day having the chance to appear in one of his RKO Studios motion pictures.  What they all had in common was a full-figured beauty on display, the supposed female desire of all American men, where Hughes was the original Hugh Hefner, displaying the 50’s Playboy magazine mentality even before Hefner started his enterprise.  As described in Charles Higham’s 1993 biography, Howard Hughes: The Secret Life, at least partially used in Scorsese’s depiction of Hughes in THE AVIATOR (2004):

The appropriate actress would be given the use of an elegant house in Beverly Hills or Bel-Air, with a maid. At exactly 7 a.m., she must rise and take a shower and make up. At seven-thirty, the maid would serve her breakfast. At eight, a driver would take her to acting, dancing, and singing lessons. In the afternoon, she must rest or watch TV. Shopping was permitted once a week. In the evening she would go to one of six restaurants Hughes specified. She was forbidden to date. A driver would be her companion for dinner. … The drivers were told never to negotiate bumps in a road at more than two miles an hour as the jolt to the automobile might cause the girls’ breasts to sag.

While this reflected the Hughes rule, anyone failing to adhere to the strict protocol was fired on the spot, including the chauffeurs, who were instructed to have no intimate contact with the girls, with Hughes hiring private detectives to guarantee compliance.  In this restrictive, puritanical atmosphere of the Eisenhower era of the 50’s, a love story develops between an aspiring young actress, Marla Mabrey (Lily Collins), and her assigned chauffeur Frank Forbes, Alden Ahrenreich from Hail, Caesar! (2016), something that is strictly forbidden, but they sneak around corners and learn to live by their own titular mantra.  But initially it’s all eye contact, as Frank is assigned to pick up Marla and her overly possessive mother (Annette Bening) at the airport, learning Marla was crowned the Apple Blossom Queen back in Virginia, as he drives them to a gorgeous mansion overlooking the Hollywood Bowl.  It doesn’t take long before she realizes she’s just one of dozens of girls all striving for the same thing, each one promised a screen test by Hughes.  While they all come from a strict religious background, with Frank already engaged to a high school sweetheart back home in Fresno, not much happens under the watchful eye of her mother, yet Marla, the only vulnerable character in the film, has the kind of dreamy, wild-eyed enthusiasm and innocence that other star-struck actors wish they possessed, where her real intent is not acting, but writing songs.  Part of the comic absurdity is her mother sensing what’s really going on, indignant that no one has actually met Mr. Hughes, or had a screen test, believing it’s all a sham of some kind, as these girls are being exploited without actually having a chance to appear in pictures.  Defiantly, she heads back to Virginia in a huff, leaving Marla on her own, still tapping into her own personal dreams and ambitions, not yet ready to call it quits and head back to the University of Virginia as her fallback plan.  In this opening, Frank steps out of the shadows, another small-town kid with his own dreams, where he’s got his eyes set on some property on Mullholland Drive, but he needs an investor, hoping he can entice Mr. Hughes, if he ever meets him.  In his eyes (and the audience), Marla is perceived as an ideal, a paragon of virtue, expressing exactly the same kind of illusion Hollywood personified back in the 50’s, a good Baptist girl who doesn't drink, smoke, or “go all the way,” informing her she’s not like the others, who are overtly sexual, accentuating their buxom physiques, telling her she’s an exception, that “the rules don’t apply to you.”  Spontaneously writing a song for the occasion, the romantic overtones are inevitable. 

What holds the viewer’s attention early on is the complete absence of Howard Hughes, yet Marla has lofty thoughts of the kind of man he must be, extravagantly rich, everyone at his beck and call, so important and all, where she even dreams of him making a good President.  By the time she actually meets him, he appears out of the dark, tongue-tied, not even sure who she is, where they sit and eat Stouffer’s TV dinners on folding trays, peeling back the aluminum foil while Hughes awkwardly tries to think of something to say, invariably excusing himself as he attends to other pressing business, where he’s seen as a man stymied by his own changeable moods, often to the point of paralysis, where he rambles incoherently, repeats himself, and has a pathological fear that TWA executives attempting to purchase his aviation company are secretly trying to find him legally insane so they can take over the company, so he refuses to meet with them, or even reveal where he is.  In this hidden and secretive manner, he continues to conduct his company’s business, growing increasingly erratic.  Beatty seems to relish the idea of playing Hughes for laughs and comic amusement, often seen where he’s crazy as a loon, but watching a feeble old man whose best years are behind him isn’t really funny, especially when he’s obsessed by watching old movie footage of himself when he was an aviator and still a virile young man, continually reliving his youth, playing it out in his head so often he could almost believe it was still real.  This kind of pathetic display is more tragic than anything else, but the film reveals no backstory about Hughes, where we’re not given any details about what led him to this pitiful state.  The film really dovetails in exposing the mad eccentricities of the man, as it’s just not that interesting seeing someone so out of touch with himself gradually losing focus.  If he were a sympathetic figure, it might be different, but Hughes is larger than life, a demanding egomaniac obsessed only with himself, going on an outrageous binge where all he wants is Baskin Robbins banana nut ice cream, where his underlings are forced to buy all the remaining reserves as the company doesn’t make it any more, then just as quickly he changes his mind and wants something else.  The man is an infuriating business partner, where working for him is something of a nightmare.  While there are attempts to show a more intimate side of Hughes, quieter, perhaps more self-possessed, where incredibly he has romantic aspirations with Marla as well, who has grown so frustrated at the lack of progress in her career, overconsuming champagne, drinking alcohol for the first time in her life, allowing her to speak bluntly when she’s finally in the presence of the elusive one, singing a drunken arrangement of her song which plays with archival Hughes footage playing behind her, leaving the man in a trance of sensory overkill.  Out of control passions between the two lead to sex as a comical slapstick routine, becoming one of the true ick factors of the film, where he’s 79 and she looks considerably younger than 27, with more than a 50 year difference between them, where it’s hard not to see Beatty transforming into the aging Maurice Chevalier from GIGI (1958) singing “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” Thank Heaven for Little Girls from Gigi - YouTube (2:36).  While there are a few entertaining moments, mostly this is a coming out party for Lily Collins who dominates the film with her zest for life and youthful Audrey Hepburn appeal, literally stealing the film from a man who was once himself a youthful wonder and the talk of the town, rumored to have slept with nearly every female star in Hollywood, where according to Cher, “Warren has probably been with everybody I know.”  One popular theory on why Beatty turned down so many roles (prior to his marriage to Bening in 1992) was that he didn’t like interrupting his prolific love life to go to work.