The name Citizen Kane has entered the world’s vocabulary as a synonym for the greatest film ever made. Whether that reputation is entirely warranted is a perennial debate among cinephiles, but it is certain that Orson Welles’s 1941 masterpiece remains the highest-regarded piece to emerge from Hollywood’s Golden Age. Given its mythic status, it was inevitable that Citizen Kane would be honoured by the industry through countless references, homages, and, ultimately, dramatic reconstructions of its tumultuous creation. The first major attempt was the 1999 HBO docudrama RKO 281, which focused on the battle between Welles and William Randolph Hearst. The next is David Fincher’s 2020 biopic Mank, a film that shifts the spotlight from the wunderkind director to his credited co-writer, Herman J. Mankiewicz. Fincher’s technically impeccable, stylistically faithful, yet ultimately frustrating film seeks to unravel the mystery of authorship behind cinema’s most famous text, but in doing so, it becomes ensnared in the very Hollywood formulas it attempts to critique.
Mank is based on a script by Fincher’s late father, Jack Fincher, originally written in the 1990s. The screenplay draws heavily from Pauline Kael’s controversial 1971 essay Raising Kane, which posited the incendiary claim that Orson Welles was not the principal author of Citizen Kane; that mantle, Kael argued, rightfully belonged to Mankiewicz, with Welles merely contributing edits and direction. This thesis has been largely discredited by later scholarship, but it provides the foundational myth for Fincher’s film. Mank thus presents itself as a corrective biopic, aiming to restore a neglected figure to his rightful place in cinema history.
The film’s narrative is framed by the spring of 1940, where “Mank” (Gary Oldman), recovering from a leg injury exacerbated by chronic alcoholism, is hired by the 24-year-old Orson Welles (Tom Burke) and his producer John Houseman (Sam Troughton) to write a script for Welles’s debut feature. Isolated in a remote ranch, Mank dictates the story to his patient British secretary, Rita Alexander (Lily Collins). As the script—initially titled American—takes shape, Rita notices the conspicuous parallels between its protagonist, Charles Foster Kane, and the powerful newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance). Mank’s brother, Joseph (Tom Pelphrey), fears that should Hearst discover this caricature, he would retaliate mercilessly, destroying the film and everyone involved.
Through a series of extended flashbacks, the film delves into the previous decade, introducing Mank as one of the many celebrated Broadway playwrights who migrated to Hollywood following the transition to sound, a revolution that created a desperate need for witty dialogue. At the height of his powers, Mank circulates at lavish parties hosted by studio moguls like Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard) and, most significantly, Hearst himself. He forms a genuine friendship with Hearst’s mistress, the aspiring actress Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried). The film portrays Davies with notable sympathy, highlighting the discrepancy between her intelligent, charming real-life persona and the talentless, pitiful Susan Alexander Kane she would later inspire.
The flashbacks also chart the political upheavals of the 1930s: the Great Depression and the ominous rise of fascism in Europe. Mank, embodying the liberal conscience of the Hollywood intellectual, pins his hopes on Upton Sinclair (Bill Nye), the famous socialist writer who in 1934 ran as the Democratic candidate for Governor of California. Sinclair’s campaign is systematically wrecked by a vicious smear campaign orchestrated by Hearst and the studio bosses, who deploy fabricated newsreels featuring actors posing as “real” voters to ensure the election of his Republican opponent. This historical episode becomes a central trauma for Mank. Three years later, at another Hearst soiree, a drunken Mank publicly confronts his host, accusing him of hypocrisy for having supported socialist ideas in his youth before becoming a bulwark of the establishment. This confrontation serves as the film’s dramatic crux, positioning Mank’s subsequent writing of Kane as an act of personal and political vengeance.
The film concludes with Mank completing the script, which would go on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. The final moments allude to the bitter credit dispute that followed, resolved with the infamous compromise of shared authorship—a conclusion that feels both historically accurate and dramatically anticlimactic.
On a technical level, Mank is a remarkable achievement. For Fincher, this project was clearly a personal labour of love, and he directs with fastidious skill. The decision to shoot in lustrous black-and-white, the meticulous reproduction of period-appropriate camera moves, the use of optical wipe transitions, and the superb score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross—which perfectly mimics the sound of a Classic Hollywood orchestra—all constitute a conscious and successful effort to recreate the aesthetic of a 1940s studio picture. In its surface texture, Mank is a flawless simulation.
Where the film is markedly less successful is in its core ambition: to construct a compelling drama about the creation of one of history’s greatest artworks. Instead, Jack Fincher’s script sacrifices its potent subject matter to a catalogue of brutally simplistic, Oscar-grabbing clichés. The foundational trope is the physically and mentally afflicted protagonist, whose suffering is designed to showcase actorly “transformation.” We meet Mank in 1940 as a bedridden cripple; his flashbacks present him as a perpetually intoxicated, self-destructive gambler. Gary Oldman, an actor of immense talent, commits fully, but he is hamstrung by a script that demands little more than a performance of degenerative decay. Even Oldman cannot rise above the material’s reductive psychology, which suggests that genius is merely a by-product of vice and resentment.
Further adhering to the awards-season formula is the obligatory, somewhat gratuitous, inclusion of the Holocaust. As the film is set in the late 1930s, it seems a mandatory ingredient for any serious period piece. Mank spends considerable time pontificating about the threat of Hitler, while the subplot involving Rita Alexander’s boyfriend, who serves in the Royal Navy and is feared lost at sea, feels like a narrative box being ticked to underscore the global stakes. It is a superficial gesture towards gravitas.
The film’s most egregious flaw, however, is the element that renders it paradoxically dated and chained to Hollywood’s immediate political preoccupations. An excessive amount of screen time is devoted to the relatively obscure 1934 California gubernatorial election. The film recreates in detail the MGM-produced fake newsreels used to sabotage Upton Sinclair. This historical excavation is not merely academic; it functions as a painfully transparent allegory for the 2016 US presidential election. The film reflects a belief, ubiquitous within the Hollywood bubble and Western liberal circles, that Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump could be attributed primarily to a foreign disinformation campaign (Russian instead of homegrown studio propaganda). In Mank, Hearst’s media manipulation is presented as the sole reason for Sinclair’s defeat, absolving the electorate of any agency or ideological complicity. This heavy-handed parallel transforms what could have been a solid, fascinating biopic into a piece of crude contemporary agitprop. It suggests that the real drama of Citizen Kane’s creation was not about artistic collaboration or personal vendetta, but about a writer’s righteous crusade against “fake news”—a modern preoccupation awkwardly grafted onto the past.
In conclusion, Mank is a film of profound contradiction. It is a technically masterful, lovingly crafted homage to Classic Hollywood cinema, yet it is also a dry, didactic, and ultimately disappointing experience. Its narrative is so preoccupied with scoring contemporary political points and adhering to awards-bait conventions that it forgets to truly illuminate its fascinating central character or the complex alchemy that produced a masterpiece. As such, Mank can only be recommended to the most dedicated cinephiles and historians of Hollywood—those willing to sift through its ornate period detail and anachronistic sermonising to appreciate Fincher’s directorial prowess, while mourning the more compelling, less formulaic film that might have been.
RATING: 5/10 (++)
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