Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Amanda Seyfried is here. Like, she’s here, here. This is not clueless Karen from Mean Girls. This is not sweet Sophie from Mamma Mia. This is Amanda Seyfried, an Actor with a capital “A,” gearing up for an awards season as a serious Oscar contender for Mank. And she whole-heartedly deserves the win.
Seyfried puts everyone who underestimated her talents to shame in David Fincher‘s biographical drama, coming to Netflix tomorrow. While Gary Oldman affably comes apart at the seams as the lovable mess that was Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, Seyfried has a trickier tightrope to walk as Marion Davies, the 1920s and ’30s actor whose romantic relationship with newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst became forever associated with the cruel portrayal of her counterpart, played by Dorothy Comingore, in Citizen Kane. Oldman’s Mankiewicz (Mank, for short) insists that his character Susan Alexander Kane—Kane’s childlike second wife, whose terrible singing voice is only rivaled by her terrible IQ—isn’t based on Davies. But the association stuck.
Enter Seyfried as Davies, in a performance that upends all stereotypes of the “ditzy Hollywood blonde.” Her first scene in the film finds her playfully bantering with Mank while she is literally being burned at the stake (for a part, of course). Credit should be given to Fincher and his father Jack, who wrote the Mank screenplay before his death in 2003, for introducing Davies as a verbal sparring partner.
She is never portrayed as beneath him intellectually, but rather, as an equal. Seyfried inflects her dialogue with just the right amount of a ’30s Brooklyn accent—the Singin’ In the Rain “I can’t stand him” voice but dialed down to an actual human level. Her sharp gaze pierces right through Mank’s bullshit, and she punctuates it with a confident, devastating flick of her cigarette. A quirk of her eyebrow communicates “I know I’m better than this, but what can you do?” in a single glance.
She demands your respect and your attention in every scene she’s in, even when she’s blurting out troubling insight into her lover’s power over U.S. politics. Seyfried plays this moment not as a “dumb blonde” slip, but one of genuine, justifiable confusion: “Since when does anyone care what I have to say?” Later, when she tells Mank how she and Hearst first met, her eyes flash with just a split second of rage as she recalls her mother telling her to “kick a little higher” to attract the attention of the richest man in the country.
You’ll find it hard to forgive this version of Mank for turning a woman of her incredible gravitas into the helpless, naive Kane character she becomes. (“It’s not her,” he insists, but she doesn’t believe him, and neither do we.)
Let us learn from Mank’s mistakes and not underestimate Seyfried this awards season. Perhaps we’re already late on the draw—it takes skill to make a line like, “I’m a mouse, duh” as iconic as it is. But we’re here now, and hopefully, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will join us. Davies never got awards recognition, and Comingore’s Citizen Kane character was left off the Oscars ballot, as well. With Mank, Seyfried proves she’s a laudable actor who deserves the Academy’s respect—and their shiny statue, too.
