Mank (2020): A Review

In 2018, our culture suddenly decided it cared about Orson Welles again—for something other, that is, than selling frozen peas, or having embarrassing drunken outtakes during the filming of Paul Masson commercials. The last few years have been a perhaps unexpectedly fertile period of Orsoniana. It started with the release of a posthumously-completed Welles work, The Other Side of the Wind, on Netflix. This was accompanied by a documentary about the director's final years and the making of the unfinished work, They'll Love Me When I'm Dead. Then, two years later, Netflix was at it again, releasing an Oscar-bait historical biopic, Mank, about the screenwriter, Herman Mankiewicz, who co-authored the script of Citizen Kane. Orson was everywhere, all at once. 

There's just one odd thing: it's not entirely clear why all these works suddenly found Welles relevant again; or what exactly they wanted to say about him. There is some general sense in which they all partake of the revisionist project of puncturing the myth of a great man. Whenever pop culture gets ahold of an historic figure again that it has been neglecting for a while, after all, it will either be to elevate the "previously forgotten" or to dash down the over-praised; still, though, as a friend of mine likes to point out, Orson Welles seems a rather odd target for this treatment. 

This friend has a rant he likes to deliver about how, despite their best efforts, no one has seemed to actually find anything particularly discreditable about Welles' past. They'll Love Me When I'm Dead, while clearly infatuated enough with its subject, wishes to pursue a familiar narrative arc of decline and fall. It portrays Welles (yet again) as a tragic and washed-up figure who ultimately failed to live up to his wunderkind promise and ultimately alienated those around him, even those who had been devoted to him. And I guess he did go on TV with Burt Reynolds and make fun of Peter Bogdanovich in a slightly-harsh way. And I guess he asked for money in a slightly awkward manner at an awards dinner one time. Other than that, though, there's not that much material for a Luciferian fall from grace to work with here. 

At least They'll Love Me When I'm Dead respects its subject's artistry, however. There is vastly less excuse to be made for Mank, which came out two years later. Here, the premise of the film derives from a discredited conspiracy theory that Mankiewicz was the true, practically sole author of the Citizen Kane screenplay, and that Welles deserves basically no credit for it. This is a bad starting place for a historical drama (though in fairness the film does not dwell so much on it, likely knowing that the theory will not bear much scrutiny) and it sets the film up to be a pseudo-revisionist take on Welles that tries but fails to put the lie to the great man theory of history and the "auteur" theory of film. In keeping with this mission, the film is full of unsubtle leftist politics, sympathetically portraying Upton Sinclair's quixotic (and that's indeed the term for it, if you've seen the film) bid for governor of California.

There's just a few problems with all of this. As we already said, the theory on which the film rests seems to be false, as a factual matter. It's therefore less revisionism than baseless tattle: the pop-cultural ebb and flow that must periodically "pull down established honour" and "hawk for news/Whatever [its] loose fantasy invent," as Yeats would put it. Far worse though, the film is hypocritical, in the worst kind of Hollywood way. For all its pretense of taking on the "great man" theory, after all—for all its pretensions of debunking the "auteurs" of the world—it really just seeks to elevate the fragile and hungry ego of one male creative over another. "Welles didn't do it, Mank did!" 

Likewise, for all the film's heavy-handed populism, its true underlying view of the world is that other people—particularly women—should exist to serve the needs and prop up the sagging egos of male artists, specifically Mank himself—whose real historical identity is irrelevant here, since he is just a stand-in for all frustrated aspiring writers and artist-types who feel they are smarter, wiser, more politically-awakened and radical than everyone else around them, and that it is for that reason alone they so far haven't been given their due. 

Mank's attitude to women is frankly unforgivable; and I don't mean the man's, I mean the film's. Our filmmakers ensure that in whatever setting he finds himself, Mank is surrounded by women much younger than himself who seem to do nothing but unaccountably worship him. The purpose of women in Mank's view is clearly to be either all-giving mother figures or contemptible objects of fleeting sexual interest. In an early scene, for instance, a chorus girl with a nearly-bare chest sits in a room with a group of male screenwriters, including Mank and various historic heavyweights (Ben Hecht, S.J. Perelman, George Kaufman, etc.), as the men trade sexual banter. (I think we're meant to see them as rakishly charming; they just come off as assholes.) Then, on his way out the door, Mank turns to the woman. "What I wouldn't give to see that in a tight sweater," he says. Then he's out the door. She never speaks a line of dialogue. 

Later on, our filmmakers give us a running "gag" in which Mank can't remember the name of the wife or mistress of a tragically-suicidal leftist filmmaker friend of his, because there have been so many women in his past. "Fay, is it?" he asks. "I'm Eva," she says, "Fay was his first." Then, when he's talking to the suicidal friend, he gets the woman's name wrong again. The suicidal male friend, of course, we mourn. He is a person. He has real feelings. The woman is disposal and forgettable; and that's the whole "joke." 

All of that is almost more tolerable to watch, though, than Mank's relationships with the women he ostensibly "loves." Mank's wife, Sara, is portrayed as an all-nurturing figure who exists solely to disrobe and tuck in Mank after he has gotten piss-drunk yet again; to shake her head in bemused "what am I going to do with you?" affection at his self-centered behavior and delusions of grandeur; and to inexplicably encourage his bizarre chaste flirtation with W.R. Hearst's young wife (who also worships Mank, of course, saying to him, when confronted with a couple lines about Dulcinea, "did you write that?" And he says "No, a fellow named Cervantes," of whom she has presumably never heard. You may be gathering at this point that Mank's script is not nearly as literate and highbrow as it thinks it is. Also, Mank is Quixote. He will spell this out for us even more directly later on, if you didn't catch it from this relatively early scene). 

In fairness, Sara does have a speech toward the end of the film in which she rattles off the list of ways in which she has sacrificed for Mank, but it is ultimately only in a "golly, why do I put up with ya, ya big lug?" kind of way. 

But one all-giving young woman/mother-figure who does nothing all day but engage in inexplicable Mank-worship, in spite of his worst behavior, is plainly not enough. The filmmakers add several more.

The framing narrative features Mank cooling out at a ranch in the Mojave desert, in which he is attended by a young British amanuensis, Lily, as he dictates the first draft of the script of Citizen Kane. She is depicted as having a husband flying for the Royal Air Force. Mank, upon learning this, mocks her husband and the idea of aircraft carriers. 

At one point, she receives a letter announcing that her husband has been shot down in the North Sea. As she turns her back to read it, and Mank doesn't yet know what's in the letter—but we all in the audience do, of course, because this is such an obvious storytelling beat and has been so painfully telegraphed—Mank continues to berate the RAF and the idea of aircraft carriers. She then throws down the letter and runs tearfully from the room, etc. 

All of which would seem to be setting us up for a scene in which Mank learns his lesson and the two reconcile. Which is close to what happens, except Mank never apologizes. Instead, Lily comes back in to tell him that he's right about aircraft carriers (he is? and does that matter? why on earth do we have to give him that, after he's behaved like such a jerk?), but that he shouldn't be so callous; then she finds that he is passed out from drink again, and she rushes to his side, all thought of her quite possibly dead husband vanished from her mind, and she nurses Mank back to health. 

The next time the two talk, we've still never seen Mank apologize, but for some reason Lily now entirely adores him. He says something insulting (we're again meant to think it's charming) to one of the women bustling around. "I couldn't have said it better myself," he croaks, in response to her use of a hackneyed phrase, "which is probably why I write for the movies." Lily instantly springs to his defense. "You write for the movies because you're super at it!" she says, her eyes shining. 

Why does she suddenly care so much about Mank and need to come to his aid, after he just one scene earlier made fun of her pilot husband, whom she still, as of this scene, presumes to be missing and most likely drowned or lost at sea? I guess simply because we all know and agree that Mank's fragile ego is the most important thing in the world, and must be tended to at every moment, including at first sign he is fishing for a compliment. 

Okay, one more of these: 

Shortly thereafter, Lily confronts Mank about his drinking, telling him to lay off the booze and work on his screenplay. He dismisses her advice in a contemptuous way. She storms out of the room again, and yet again, we think maybe this time Mank will learn from the consequences of his selfish behavior and grow. 

But no. Of course not. This is Mank. It is Lily, rather, who will have to learn her lesson, which here and always is that Mank is the best person ever and he knows best. 

Lily, you see, rushes into the other room where she speaks to Mank's other female attendant, a German physical therapist. The fräulein explains to Lily that Mank rescued her "entire village" from the Nazis (somehow) and brought them all to America (somehow). She then tells Lily that Mank's drinking is therefore not to be interfered with (why?) and he must be treated as a grown man who can make his own decisions. 

Lily is then of course deeply chastened. She pours Mank a drink and tells him what a good man he is, and how wrong she was to question his alcoholic habits and brutish tactlessness and condescension. So we realize that there was no point at all to this entire scene except to re-establish—in case we missed it the first eight hundred times—that Mank is always right and the women around him always wrong. 

All of which seems pretty sexist, but in fairness to the filmmakers, the point of basically every scene in the movie is just to confirm all over again that Mank is morally and intellectually the better of whoever happens to be in his presence. 

There is a scene in the interior of the Hearst castle, for instance, when Mayer and Thalberg and various other big-shots are sitting around with Mank, talking about the state of the world from the perspective of the extremely wealthy living through the very trough of the Great Depression. Visually, the scene imparts a creepy frisson. (Here as elsewhere, the gorgeous, period-appropriate cinematography is the only thing that excuses this film.) There is a very Last Tycoon ambience, as these Hollywood studio patriarchs drink toasts to the day the banks reopen and discuss the risk of a potential Bolshevik takeover. One is reminded of the scene in Fitzgerald's unfinished novel, in which the Hollywood elite discuss their personal contingency plans in the event of a leftwing revolution. One is momentarily interested in the film. 

But then, unbearable Mank starts talking again, and it turns out the point of this entire scene is just to establish that 1) Mank appreciates the true threat and danger posed by Hitler before everyone else does; 2) Mank understands the "difference between socialism and communism" and is a good liberal and supports Upton Sinclair's noble bid for the governorship that will help the common man; and 3) Mank is the only man there who truly captures the interest of Hearst's young bombshell wife, because he is so wise and clever and has so much more integrity than all these other dirtbags. 

The film is a long patchwork of scenes like this, culminating in an utterly ludicrous one in which Mank shows up drunk to a Hearst dinner party and proceeds boorishly to break a glass and then to berate the guests for selling out their ideals in the name of "power over people." We are surely all cheering for Hearst when he finally shows him the door. 

What is perhaps most unacceptable about Mank, though, is the sense of missed opportunity. 

Along with the other Orson Welles lore to emerge over the last few years, the film was clearly an attempt in part to make Welles material seem relevant to contemporary concerns. Welles' most famous film has something to tell us about the corruption of the rich and powerful, after all. The Republican campaign that Hearst and his cronies run in Mank to defeat Sinclair's gubernatorial bid is steeped in demagogic falsehood and fear-mongering (shades of Trumpism and the present-day GOP, which our film is not shy or subtle about broadcasting (as, indeed, it is not shy or subtle about anything)). And by making the story about Mank, rather than Welles, the film clearly thinks it is making a #MeToo-adjacent point about the excessive power held by over-praised "great men" in Hollywood. 

It is an inexpressible shame that the film chose to pursue all of these goals, however, in such a painfully smug, self-righteous, and hypocritical way. If the movie aspires to make a #MeToo point, after all, tilting heroically at the excessive power wielded by big-shots in film, then maybe it shouldn't have been itself so steeped and rancid with sexism; maybe it shouldn't have based itself entirely around burnishing the reputation of a single male ego—substituting Mank for Welles and otherwise changing nothing. 

If the film wishes to critique right-wing demagogy that relies on falsehoods, maybe it shouldn't have itself been tendentious propaganda in favor of a debunked conspiracy theory. If it wanted to make a case for left-wing politics, couldn't it have done so in a slightly more sophisticated and less heady-handed way? Couldn't it have offered something other than a series of false-ringing scenes in which socialists deliver moral denunciations of injustice and everyone else is silenced by their overpowering brilliance and integrity? 

There's one other crucial way in which Mank constitutes a missed opportunity. If the filmmakers—if our whole popular culture—really wanted to rediscover Orson Welles again in the period 2018-20—and to make him relevant to our contemporary political concerns—there is a vastly better way to do it: a way that one filmmaker, far more obscure than the likes of David Fincher, managed to discover, but that everyone else seems to have missed. 

Before I saw Mank, before I saw the 2018 Netflix documentary on Welles, or any of the rest of it, I happened to watch a totally different documentary on Welles from that very same year—The Eyes of Orson Welles (2018) by filmmaker Mark Cousins, currently available for streaming on the Criterion Channel. Sure, this film is not perfect either. It is a tad ponderous, maybe pretentious. By the time we get to the scene where someone playing the voice of Welles reads out a hypothetical posthumous response to the filmmaker's hypothetical letter to Orson, we are ready for this glacially-paced excursion to end. But the documentary gets things right about Welles, and manages to make him relevant again for our moment, in  a way all the other recent Orsoniana entries we've been discussing failed to do. 

This documentary does not portray Welles as a tragic figure, after all, but simply as a gifted artist and rather warm human character, with strong left-wing moral and political convictions of his own. This documentary does not engage in any conspiracy-theorizing about the scriptwriting process for Kane. Indeed, Cousins' whole contention is that Welles had a fundamentally visual intelligence. What is left behind of his papers, as the documentary explores, comes largely in the form of sketches and drawings, rather than in written remarks, and the point of Welles' filmmaking oeuvre, Cousins suggests, is in his visual artistry. All of which tends to suggest that the whole bogus, confabulated "Who wrote Kane?" controversy is irrelevant. The screenplay is not what made the film great to start with, so who cares?

And Welles' own leftist politics and dark-yet-humanistic vision of the world, as it emerges from Cousins' documentary, resonates vastly more viscerally and hauntingly than the superficial pseudo-populism of the Mank movie. Indeed, Welles' words as they are retrieved for this documentary sometimes seem even more on-point for the present moment than they would have been just three years ago, when Cousins released his film—particularly so when it comes to Welles' comments on racial justice and police brutality. 

Welles, we learn from the film, grew up attending a Unitarian church in the town of Kenosha, Wisconsin, and Cousins argues that it was from his mother's participation in this community that Welles derived his first sense of social justice, and the earliest roots of his humanistic worldview. Cousins could not have known at the time he was putting this film together, however, that Welles' hometown of Kenosha would later become the scene of some of the largest protests in the summer of 2020, during the movement against police killings of Black people. Cousins could not have known that the very same church that Welles grew up attending, which still exists as a Unitarian Universalist congregation, would become the sight of a famous image than symbolized this moment in history as few other images would, in which a parking lot was lit ablaze and illuminated the church's own "Black Lives Matter" sign, providing a photograph that ricocheted across social media. ("We would rather lose 100 buildings than one more life to police violence," the minister of the church would subsequently write.)

Cousins was making his film in the age of "Black Lives Matter," but he could not have known how deeply some of Welles' words would resonate years later, if one happened to be watching his documentary (as I was) during the week of the Derek Chauvin trial. Welles, it turns out, used his role in a BBC show he hosted to draw attention to specific incidents of racist police brutality and the targeting of unarmed Black men. 

He told the story of a Black soldier, Isaac Woodard, who had lost his eyesight after racist police in a southern town ejected him from a public bus, attacked him and beat him up, and then poured gin over his unconscious body and hauled him into prison on false charges. "The blind soldier fought for me during the war," said Welles, in a radio broadcast to millions in which he sought justice for the wounded man, "I have eyes; he hasn't. I have a voice on radio." 

On his BBC Sketchbook program, Welles returned to this same case and theme—one still very much with us. As if speaking to all white people now, in 2021, in Chauvin's America, with a message that still chills the blood, Welles intoned: "I'm willing to admit that the policeman has a difficult job, a very hard job. But it's the essence of our society that a policeman's job should be hard. He's there to protect, to protect the free citizen. [...] I know it's very nice to look out of our window in our comfortable home and see the policeman there protecting our home; we should be grateful for the policeman; but I think we should be grateful, too, for the laws which protect us against the policeman." 

Of course, Welles knew, from Woodard's experience and that of so many other innocent people, just how weak those laws are, and how fragile and insubstantial the individual rights they protect, how powerless our social order is currently to stop abuse of power, how constantly menaced these protections are by the temptations of racism, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, fascism that lurk in our society. We are discovering all of this again today, in the wake of George Floyd's murder and the Black Lives Matter protests. All of this was precisely Welles' point. As Cousins reveals, Welles' work constitutes a long warning against fascism and totalitarianism—a message Welles made explicit in his discussion of his adaptation of Kafka's The Trial. 

All of this is social criticism of a far more profound sort than the smug self-congratulation on display in Mank. It speaks to our present moment far more directly, and without resort to cheap propaganda and historic falsehoods. If we wish to revive Orson Welles for the present, and I think we should, let it not be to try to disgrace him again or muddy his reputation for no reason at all. Let it be to actually listen to the words he had for us; which we will find speak quite starkly to our present condition.