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Actor Oldman (left) in "Mank": Court jester for the bosses
Photo: Netflix
It has long since become an iconic scene in film history: in "Citizen Kane", Charles Foster Kane breathes his last, mysterious word on his deathbed in his magnificent palace Xanadu - "Rosebud" - then a snow globe falls from his hand and rolls Down a few steps and shattered: End of an empire.
The 1941 film tells of the rise, ruin and fall of the lonely media tycoon Kane.
With its radical narrative style and technical breaking of taboos, Orson Welles' directorial debut is still one of the best films of all time.
Apparently, US director David Fincher, 58, is also a big fan - so big that he has now made a film about the genesis of »Citizen Kane« himself.
In it, the main character Herman J. Mankiewicz, known as "Mank", is hired by the young director Welles as a screenwriter for "Kane".
He is a disaffected industry veteran with drinking problems, played by Gary Oldman.
He is quartered in a farmhouse outside of town to keep him out of distractions.
But he couldn't escape anyway: after a car accident he was lying down with broken bones, toddled by a housekeeper and a young secretary who types up his notes.
But of course the shrewd old man finds ways and means to get one or the other bottle of schnapps.
"Mank" is based on a script by Fincher's late father.
It is a work of art obsessed with detail, turned in elegant black and white, which is already considered a favorite for the upcoming Academy Awards.
The film has everything the Academy loves.
A director who over the years has positioned himself for the major awards in the industry, a brilliant, Oscar-winning leading actor in the role of a historical underdog - and a plot that revolves around Hollywood's favorite topic: Hollywood.
Unfortunately not very exciting
For the streaming service Netflix, which financed and produced »Mank«,
The prestigious drama is also so important because the chances of winning the longed-for first Oscar for the »Best Film« are pretty good: Many films have been postponed due to the pandemic, there is less competition.
But unfortunately the story about the importance of »Mank« for Netflix and the cinema business, which is in crisis in the pandemic, is more exciting than the film itself.
Director Fincher has worked his way up from a Hollywood prodigy to a celebrated cinema omaestro with serial killer dramas like "Seven" and clever social observations like "The Social Network".
It is all the more astonishing that, despite all of its artistically high-quality attributes, the film is rarely carried away.
As a viewer, one often feels as paralyzed as Oldman's film character in his labor camp - and thirsts for the captivating mystery of this film, its »Rosebud«.
From bed, Mankiewicz delirates himself into vignettes of his own biography, a flashback structure that Fincher borrowed from "Citizen Kane": You can see how the sharp-tongued author became a kind of court jester for MGM studio boss Louis B. Mayer and in the 1930s the media giant William Randolph Hearst - and fell from grace when he could no longer stand their moral depravity and political intrigues.
The dismantling of the writer and political career changer Upton Sinclair, who was defamed as a socialist by the film studio and the Yellow Press empire Hearsts, is exemplified.
Too humorless, too hermetic
The influential publisher and Hitler admirer Hearst served as a model for the newspaper Zampano Kane.
When word got around in Hollywood, Mank, Welles and the RKO film studio were put under massive pressure by Hearst and Mayer and threatened with boycotts.
But Mankiewicz doesn't care if he becomes a persona non grata, and in Orson Welles he finds an independent young savage who wants to shake the pillars of the system with him.
Welles rarely appears in "Mank", however, at the beginning and at the end when a dispute breaks out over whether Mankiewicz should be mentioned in the credits of the film.
In Fincher's interpretation, Mank in particular is responsible for the masterpiece, and this legend has long been refuted.
Much more dramatic is that Fincher fails to condense his ballad from the sad scriptwriter Quixote into a gripping narrative that works even without extensive prior knowledge of the »Citizen Kane« history.
Too humorless, too hermetic are Fincher's excursions into a world that is likely to remain alien to younger audiences in particular.
Instead of opening his nerdy obsessions to a mass audience, as he has done in earlier films, Fincher in »Mank« addresses himself almost exclusively to the closed circle of those who know and who are faithful to the work.
So it could be that, despite all the advance praise, his film is threatened with a fate similar to that of “Citizen Kane”: At the box office, the later cinema monument was initially not a great success, and from glorious nine Oscar nominations, including “Best Film” and “Best Director” , only one trophy remained - for the script.
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