Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Mank’ on Netflix, a Movie About Movies That Only a Movie Lover Could Love

Netflix’s greatest shot at Oscar glory this year is Mank, about how screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz wrote Citizen Kane. Yes. I know. Another movie about movies. Although you may be shocked to hear that it’s not necessarily about how great Hollywood is. Yet at the same time, it’s also a reminder about how great Hollywood movies are, since it’s essentially about the greatest one ever made. It has plenty of cred — David Fincher directs from a screenplay written by his father, Jack Fincher, 20 years ago, and notorious shapeshifter and Oscar-winner Gary Oldman stars, AND it’s shot in ultra-luxuriant black-and-white. Now here’s where someone who loves movies (hint: I very much resemble this someone) parses his feelings about movies about movies (hint: his feelings range from weary to wearier) to determine if this movie about a movie is good or not.

MANK: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: RKO Pictures, home of King Kong and dozens of other movies, has handed 24-year-old Hollywood wunderkind Orson Welles full creative control of his first picture. No studio buttinskys, final cut, all that. Wild. It’s 1940. He hired Herman J. Mankiewicz, a.k.a. Mank, to write it. Mank is a drunkard and a gambler and witty as f— and he’s a Hollywood veteran who did uncredited script-doctor-type work on San Francisco and The Wizard of Oz and many others. He’s flat on his back and convalescing from a car wreck when he’s schlepped to a guest house in the Mojave with a secretary, Rita Alexander (Lily Collins), so he can bang out a script in 90-no-make-that-60 days. In a cast that eats up the lower half of his torso and most of one leg. And sober. He has to do it sober. He’s 43 and being played by Oldman, who’s 62. Mank’s miserable.

Mank jumps between Mank sweating into his immense plaster immobilizer and the early 1930s, when events occurred that inspired him to write about a megarich lonely newspaper tycoon whose attempt to launch a political career flopped. Mank works in a writers room for MGM, where he and the boys gamble on coinflips and poker hands while a secretary wearing pasties and not much else transcribes their gibber; occasionally, they pitch an idea to the boss. He kowtows with Louis Mayer (Arliss Howard) and David O. Selznick (Toby Leonard Moore) and other movie-biz execs whose names you should recognize in movie credits if you’re paying attention, and if you don’t recognize them, you probably aren’t watching Mank. Mank wanders onto an MGM backlot one day, walks past a bunch of white guys dressed as Indian warriors and chats up superstar actress Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried), who happens to be dating William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance), a megarich lonely newspaper tycoon whose attempt to launch a political career flopped. AHA. There you go.

Mank charms Hearst, which earns him an invite to a soiree at the guy’s castle-with-elephants-and-giraffes-on-the-grounds. Ahead in 1940, Mank toils and toils and gets feedback that his screenplay jumps around too much and is too long even though he’s not even done with the first act and he only has two weeks to go. In comes a crate of booze; Rita sighs. Back to 1934, Hearst and Mayer use their sway to push a Republican into California’s governor’s seat because the Democrat, Upton Sinclair, is obviously a socialist and a communist and all types of other anti-American things that might result in them having slightly less than way too much money. Mank rankles at the political propaganda films MGM produces, which mesh nicely with Hearst’s signature yellow journalism — and by golly, next thing you know, they’ll be running alleged commies out of town! Forth to 1940, is he done yet. Back to the ’30s, how drunk and how far in debt is he. Forth, it’s the best thing he’s ever done. Back, he’s in the new screenwriter’s union. Back and forth. Back and forth. This is a movie about how movies that jump back and forth are made.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Trumbo is the far more conventional bio that illustrates what happened with the Hollywood communist blacklist scandal. Barton Fink covers the tortured-screenwriter thing. Hitchcock dramatizes the making of a masterpiece, Psycho.

Performance Worth Watching: A good chunk of Mank’s Oscar hype focuses on Seyfried, who’s rich and effervescent as Marion Davies. The performance has that Cate Blanchett-as-Katharine Hepburn charm all over it.

Memorable Dialogue: Mank sweats and frets over his script.

Rita: You’re not writing an opera.

Mank: But I AM writing an opera!

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Mank is Inside Baseball: The Movie for people who watch Turner Classic Movies endlessly. There is no stepping into it blind; Fincher doesn’t care if you have a compass, and he’s not about to give you one. The elder, now late Fincher’s screenplay is an indulgent meander that’s given drive, momentum and purpose by his son’s notoriously meticulous directing style. Oldman gives another alchemical performance, big, grandiose, clever, almost annoying in the way he so deeply immerses himself in moments that entertain us so wildly that we absolutely realize we’re Watching A Movie.

Visually, the film is dangerously handsome, a winking pastiche to 1940s style and technique (including the visual cues in the corner of the screen telling the projectionist to switch reels, something a bunch of us learned about by watching Fincher’s Fight Club). But Mank, the movie, is not an empty suit. It depicts the Hollywood products of the day as wondrous art (hint: they pretty much are), but it’s not at all nostalgic for the corrupt business ethics behind them, and that’s what makes Mank’s life’s work, a movie about the moral slide of the American upper crust, so vital. One darkly comic scene finds the filthy rich Mayer informing MGM employees that they need to take a 50 percent pay cut for eight weeks because it’s the Great Depression, and Mank quips, “Not even the most disgraceful thing I’ve ever seen.”

Structurally, the film is charmingly disheveled, like Mank when he’s two-and-a-half sheets to the wind (it’s the third sheet you need to worry about). You’ll follow him deep into the night if you’re part of his insider crew, laugh at his funny lines, side with his lefty politics. The film, like many movies about movies, is a bit up its own ass, a bit too cagey, a bit too self-satisfied, frequently so caught up with rapid-firing references it forgets to tell a story. If you fire up Mank and aren’t feeling it, you probably haven’t watched enough classic Tinseltown — and if that’s the case, these type of movies tend to make a person feel like an outsider looking in.

Our Call: STREAM IT. But only if you’ve ever considered taking the TCM cruise.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Mank on Netflix