Mank Thoughts

I’ll start with one of these lazy lines as a substitute for wit and insight: Mank is just Bohemian Rhapsody for people who own Chinatown on DVD.

Lots of movies were released this year, but nothing of consequence — at least that’s how it feels, since everything was by necessity tossed on the big streaming pile alongside Emily in Paris and The Great British Baking Show and reruns of Mad Men and Housewives and a thousand other snackables. Of course there were plenty of worthy movies released this year, but when I’m sprawled in my tv room flipping through an endless series of thumbnails, it’s easy to feel like none of them matter. The Algorithm is good at serving up things that I’m predisposed to blandly enjoy (there are hundreds of hours of Masterpiece Theatre literary adaptations, for one), but it’s not the same as going to a movie theatre with the promise of an Experience. So I was excited for Mank: it’s a big, fat piece of Oscar Bait, with stars and artistic pretensions and hype, the kind of thing that, were it released last year, I’d have gone out of my way to see in the theatre with cautious expectations but with a sense of eventfulness, alongside a friend to hash it out with. 

Mank is supposed to be an Event movie for a few reasons: it has a star director and since it’s about the origins of Citizen Kane, the canonical Greatest Film of All Time, it promised to have lots of red meat for Film types as well as some built-in gravitas. Movies about Hollywood history tend to be overpraised by film critics for obvious reasons (see La La Land). They’ll call something “a love letter to Hollywood” when it’s actually something closer to a fetishization, with the same mechanism of appeal as the Spamalot musical or romance novels about being married to Mr Darcy. But, let’s be honest: I’m exactly the target market for “love letters to Hollywood”, and sometimes projects like this can be good — especially when they’re not love letters. The greatest exemplar is Sunset Boulevard, which is a masterpiece. And I loved the silent movie pastiche The Artist, and the just-us-pals inside joking of Hail, Ceasar!, and the high camp of Feud, none of which are masterpieces but all of which hit my pleasure centers. So I was fully prepared to enjoy Mank even in the event that it wasn’t very good. 

Well, it wasn’t very good, and it also wasn’t enjoyable, even for someone entirely prepared to suspend all judgement. 

I thought about titling this entry “how I would fix Mank” but decided it would be obnoxious for someone who knows nothing about filmmaking to venture to correct the work of serious professionals. But now that we’re far enough down in the post and out of the realm of baiting, here’s how I would fix Mank: 

• A scene — any scene at all! — with Mank and Hearst where the latter is vulnerable or interesting in some human way, a person you could conceivably construct a tragic masterpiece around. 

• Find some vehicle — any other vehicle at all! — for Mank’s break with Hearst other than the costume party meltdown. Shoehorning the plot of Kane into Don Quixote is clumsy and doesn’t strike at the heart of the matter! The two stories are not thematically similar, the analogy is not compelling, and no one needs to be told the plot of Citizen Kane anyway! 

• More Amanda Seyfried as Marion Davies.

• The “writers room” scene at the beginning is meant to release dopamine in the brains of people who recognize the names. The scene shouldn’t rest on an anachronism that those same people will be eager to point out.

• Get rid of chirpy nurse, her only function is to be pretty and witless.

• I get why you’re doing the non-chronological thing, but at least have some visual markers for the different timelines; everyone looks the same in all of them and I’m confused.

• If Mank’s credit for the script is going to be the point the movie ends on, maybe raise it as a problem sometime before the final 10 minutes of the movie? And let Orson Welles state his case?

• Identify the emotional core of the story (disgust with Hollywood’s willingness to act as an instrument of propaganda? Betrayal of a close but problematic friendship? The impotence of artists making social critiques? Self-destructive geniuses? Writers not getting enough credit?) and commit to it. Gesturing at these themes is not the same as exploring them.

Okay, that’s it. I wish I could have seen Mank in a theatre with a friend so we could rant about these things over a cocktail afterward. Until then, this will have to do.

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