'Mank' Review: Fincher's Triumphant Biopic Demonstrates the Difficulty of Buying into Hollywood
Absent for the last six years, director David Fincher returns with an elegant, cynical look at the world of movies.
There is nothing more precious to a writer than the words he or she puts on a page. Every touch of the keys could lead to a legacy defining stroke of genius that makes a writer invincible in the eyes of their audience. And in the process of making this masterwork, there might even be a fascinating story behind the formulation of this creative idea that could be told as well. This is what we find at the origin of David Fincher’s latest directorial effort, “Mank.” Not only is this a project about the creation of one of the greatest films of all time, but it’s also a cathartic piece of entertainment conceived by the very man Fincher revered the most, his father Jack Fincher.
Mank illustrates the true-life events in the life of Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman), his run-ins with studio heads, Hollywood stars, and William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance). With this, Mank becomes somewhat of a puppet on a string for the world around him to use and abuse him as their punching bag. In response to this, he decides to write a screenplay based on the incidents and make a deal with Orson Welles (Tom Burke) to make it into his first picture. The name of the project is “Citizen Kane” and it puts a major target on Mankiewicz’s back for the rest of his career.
Juxtapose Mank’s story with the creation of this 2020 film. Jack Fincher wrote the script back in the 1990s, with David ready to direct it and everything. But the major studios wouldn’t allow him to make it in black and white, thus it took him three decades to finally make the movie. In that time, Jack Fincher passed away, with the project left on the shelf to collect dust for many years. But with some time in-between his last directorial effort, David Fincher decided to return to the big screen with an epic of about something he’s faced his entire career, the agonizing reality of studios interfering with the creative process, both on and off the screen.
It makes perfect sense why Fincher would be attracted to a guy like Mankiewicz, who was completely ahead of his time. Mank was a visionary writer who also had a wonderful knack for sticking his foot in his mouth and costing himself a lot of respect and privilege along the way. This made it too easy to label Mank as difficult to work with and stamped as a problem around Hollywood. The same could be said for Fincher, who since his first film, has spoken out against the big studios and their rules in light of what he thinks is the right and just vision of his motion pictures. Beyond his attention to detail, which verges on artistic obsession, Fincher wants to make movies that will last, not just within the audience’s soul, but within his own. By wanting to play ball like this, most studios haven’t worked with him since “Gone Girl” in 2014.
So why is it so hard for guys like Mankiewicz and Fincher to get along with the powerful of their industry? Well, it’s simple, they just don’t vibe with what the elites in suits believe in. As we see Mank fighting for the ideas of all writers, including then-radical Upton Sinclair, and his beliefs of calling out the broken system he works in, it’s no different than recent comments made from Fincher not understanding the current marketplace for movies like his against those big-budget blockbusters he has no intention of making again. Studios want to be able to control men or women like Mank and Fincher and yet they can’t because they are too good at what they do to stop their voices heard and their work being made. At the core of both men lie the fundamental problems of money, power, and corruption running amuck in the city of stars. Therefore, Mank writes about what he knows, and Fincher makes a movie about what he knows. Ultimately, they make two shining pieces of art that signal the new dawn of cinema and the sharp analysis of the medium in which they work.
Beyond just the two men and their personal connection, the films presents the clearest definition of the phrase “history is doomed to repeat itself” I’ve seen in quite some time. Coming off the heels of a tight presidential election, it is fascinating to see Mank sitting in the rooms of powerful men, being a fly on the wall to conservative men talking about what is best for the country when all they do is finance movies all day. And though that might seem simplistic at first, by the end of the film, it’s clear that if you control the narrative on screen, then you can control the outcomes of events off-screen. Smear campaigns and shady meetings lead to Mank discovering the bottom of the bottle more and more to hide from the sheer disgust of everything he has seen around him. We would do the same if we sat in those very rooms and heard the deplorable things these high-level socialites were doing to preserve their way of life while spitting on those below them.
At the same time, the film world has dissolved for Fincher in the last six years. The studios have almost killed off the idea of originality being their biggest selling point. Intellectual properties and cinematic universes are all the raves these days. And though he has tapped into the IP side with adaptions of international best-selling books, Fincher has mostly made them his versions of those projects and elevated the material from the primary source. In other words, he turned them into David Fincher movies and saw the potential he could bring to the project and not the other way around. But this latest venture is on Netflix, the last beacon of hope for established directors to get a blank check to make dramas and mid-budget movies of substance finances and greenlit. It’s sad to see this because while a mostly successful director, Fincher can’t match the billion-dollar demand most studios want from their projects. It turns an artistic expression into dollars and cents, and that’s not what Fincher has ever been about.
Fincher’s worked with Netflix for years on television projects, and recently signed a four-year deal to make more movies with them, so it seems he’s caught on before everyone else at how and where he will continue to thrive for the rest of his career. And as he’s found his home, he released his most damning takedown of the very places and people he fought against for years so he could do the thing he loved the most, which is making movies. It must feel nice for him to be released from the chains of restriction, and be much like Mank at the climax of the film, creating something that might be the best work of his career.