Though Citizen Kane has come to be regarded as one of the greatest films ever made — a bravura feat of technical and formal innovation, and a given on any self-respecting 'best of' list or introductory film history course — Orson Welles's provocative Hollywood debut was greeted with scattered boos each time it was announced at the 1942 Oscars.
For all its nine nominations, Kane would only bag a single shiny statuette: Best Original Screenplay.
This was to be split between Welles and his co-author, Herman J. Mankiewicz — aka Mank — the subject of David Fincher's fastidious, fast-talking tribute.
In the lead, Gary Oldman revivifies one of the studio era's sharpest wits and most reckless drunks, known as much for his conversational prowess as his contributions to films like The Pride of the Yankees and Dinner at Eight (and many, many more in an often uncredited capacity — including The Wizard of Oz).
Last time Oldman was tasked with issuing tipsy dictations of startling erudition from bed, as Winston Churchill in 2017's Darkest Hour, he picked up a statuette of his own for the trouble.
Given the Academy's fondness for historical figures, not to mention self-mythologisation, putting some money down on a 2021 nomination for the chameleonic Brit would be a better bet than any of those Mank, also an inveterate gambler, throws down in the course of the film.
Nor would I be surprised if the screenplay authored by Jack Fincher, the director's father — with its quick-on-the-draw dialogue and myriad flashbacks patterned after Kane's — gets a look-in, too. (Though to be clear, I'm talking odds more than merits.)
That the wisecracks mask what proves a fundamentally sentimental take on its unsung subject probably helps its Oscars chances.
So too the fact that the elder Fincher passed away in 2003, long before his son had amassed the kind of clout needed to get a lavish black-and-white movie for film nerds off the ground.
Before I get further ahead of myself, however, let's go back to 1942.
Neither Welles (serviceably imitated by Tom Burke here) nor the 41-year-old Mankiewicz were in attendance at Los Angeles' Biltmore Hotel the night of the fourteenth Academy Awards.
The upstart auteur was off in Brazil, shooting the ill-fated docu-fiction It's All True.
Mank, wary of the potential for public humiliation, had stayed at home with his wife Sara (Tuppence Middleton) — though he must have harboured some private hope, or he wouldn't have tuned in to the radio broadcast.
In her notorious 1971 essay Raising Kane, critic Pauline Kael wrote that the screenplay win was pointedly not for Welles, the braggadocious "boy wonder" who strode into Hollywood at the tender age of 24, already a superstar.
But she says it was rather a show of support for Mank, "their own resident loser-genius". (And in Fincher's pseudo-archival footage of the ceremony, the applause that erupts at the name "Herman J. Mankiewicz" all but drowns out the "and Orson Welles".)
More contentious was Kael's claim that Welles didn't deserve a share of the glory, so negligible were his contributions to the script.
Mank, had he still been kicking, would have agreed with her: the practiced script doctor had soured on Welles in a fight for the credit due to him, and then some, on Kane.
Fincher, taking a break from the prestige TV ventures (House of Cards, Mindhunter) that have occupied him since 2014's nervy thriller Gone Girl, seeks to make Mank's case, bringing his characteristic cynicism to bear on a slick monochrome recreation of 1930s Hollywood, where most folks don't care much for art, and even less for ethics.
That much is evidenced by the shady politicking strategies MGM uses to sway the 1934 California gubernatorial election, to our hero's consternation.
Few films are as steeped in the heady brew of Hollywood legend as Kane, the subject of many a swirling, densely plotted controversy, thanks to its overt parallels with the lives of media mogul William Randolph Hearst and his "blonde Betty Boop", actress Marion Davies (Charles Dance and Amanda Seyfried, doing her darndest to speak gee-whiz "Brooklynese"), whose high-powered company the lowly Mank once kept.
Why two generations of Fincher would want to relitigate the issue of Kane's authorship — one settled decades before the elder Fincher put pen to paper with the discrediting of Kael's sloppy research — is something that I find rather more baffling than the meaning of "rosebud".
Surely a director who regularly does upwards of 100 takes is not well-placed to take a swipe at auteur theory.
If that strikes as an uncharitable thing to say, then it's certainly no more uncharitable than the film is towards Welles.
The "wunderkind" is firmly sidelined here in order that Mank might finally get his close-up.
That in itself is no disservice to the man; it's more that the film holds him in such palpable disdain, for reasons that seem either petty or simply misplaced.
There's even a touch of passive-aggressive in the way the film borrows Kane's narrative structure but not its striking aesthetic, as was crafted by Welles and cinematographer Gregg Toland.
In place of the brooding chiaroscuro and the famous long takes is a more tempered range of greys and a steady cascade of cuts.
"You ask me what my acceptance speech might have been," Oldman's curmudgeonly scribe addresses the press in front of his house, clutching his new trophy.
"Well here goes. I am happy to accept this award in the manner in which the screenplay was written — which is to say, in the absence of Orson Welles."
Well, yes and no.
It's true that Mank, whose contract specified that he would not receive credit on Kane (like most of the 60-odd films he'd worked on prior), laboured mostly in isolation; in Fincher's film, we meet him after Welles has had him carted off to a ranch in Victorville, in the Mojave Desert — a 'dry' county in more ways than one.
But it's been well established, even if it's not shown here, that Welles was busy writing too, and re-writing the material delivered to him by go-between John Houseman (Sam Troughton).
This other half of the story should maybe be borne in mind watching Mank, when Welles, in a swishing cloak and Zorro hat, makes his entrance to an ominous swelling of the old school orchestral score (new territory for Fincher regulars Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross) — reading just shy of comic malevolence.
It's Mank himself who, in railing against a studio-made piece of right-wing propaganda disguised as news, notes the tendency of movie patrons to be "willingly checking their disbelief at the door".
Yes, Jack Fincher's vision of the 30s, written in the 90s, has uncomfortable intimations of the post-truth present.
But maybe I'm missing the point.
After all, unlike Kael's essay, Mank is less polemic than portrait, and it's as thick with detail as one would expect from the director of Zodiac.
Part of Kane's magic, however, is its fractured perspective — both in the sense that the protagonist is shown only through the eyes of the people who survive him, and that he's a product of two authors, who took quite different stances towards their creation: Mankiewicz' takedown of Hearst, who had cast him out of his social empire, is filtered through Welles's deep empathy for Don Quixote types.
In Mank, the only vision we're offered is its namesake's own.
Mank is in select cinemas from November 19, and on Netflix from December 4.
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMiamh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDIwLTExLTE5L21hbmstcmV2aWV3LWRhdmlkLWZpbmNoZXItaGVybWFuLWotbWFua2lld2ljei1jaXRpemVuLWthbmUvMTI4OTcyNTbSASdodHRwczovL2FtcC5hYmMubmV0LmF1L2FydGljbGUvMTI4OTcyNTY?oc=5
2020-11-18 20:54:00Z
52781193731980
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar