132 min | R | November 13, 2020 | Netflix
Herman Mankiewicz lies in a Victorville bed with a broken leg, drinking, dictating the screenplay that becomes Citizen Kane. David Fincher builds a movie about Old Hollywood out of his late father’s script. It is a love letter written in acid.
Herman J. Mankiewicz is a brilliant alcoholic screenwriter banished to a ranch to dry out and finish a script on deadline. The script is Citizen Kane. The film cuts between his bedridden present and a decade of flashbacks through the MGM lot, the Hearst dinner table, and a California governor’s race. Fincher frames the writing of Kane as the story of a man biting the hand that fed him champagne for years. The real subject is how power buys silence in Hollywood and what it costs one drunk to break it.
Gary Oldman plays Mank as a wit who weaponizes self-destruction. He talks circles around every studio boss in the room and knows that the talking will never save him. Amanda Seyfried plays Marion Davies as the sharpest person at the table, a chorus girl who understands exactly what her arrangement with Hearst is and refuses to be pitied for it. Their scenes together carry the warmth the rest of the film withholds. Arliss Howard turns Louis B. Mayer into a tearful tyrant who weeps on cue to cut wages. Tom Pelphrey plays brother Joseph Mankiewicz as the responsible sibling watching genius drink itself out of a career.
Fincher shoots from a screenplay written by his father Jack Fincher decades before production. He renders 1930s Hollywood in black and white that mimics the period, complete with cigarette burns in the corner of the frame and optical reel-change cues. Erik Messerschmidt’s cinematography models its deep focus and low ceilings directly on Gregg Toland’s work in Kane itself. The film is an act of formal imitation that comments on the thing it imitates. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross score it in period idiom rather than their usual electronics, which is the boldest craft choice in the picture.
This is a film made by a craftsman about craft, and it never pretends otherwise. The recreation is precise and the argument about authorship is pointed and the whole thing keeps the audience at arm’s length. Mank’s politics sharpen when the studios mobilize fake newsreels to destroy a candidate, and the film draws the line straight to its own era. The emotion lives almost entirely in Oldman and Seyfried, and Fincher trusts them to supply what his cold framing will not. It is a movie that admires its subject more than it loves him, which may be the most honest thing about it.