Citizen Kane – Memphis Flyer

Hey, did you hear the one about the starlet who was so stupid she came to Hollywood and slept with the writer? As you can tell by the misogyny, that joke is very old. Here’s another one for you: What’s the difference between a writer and a savings bond? One day, a savings bond will mature and produce income.

I got a million of ’em.

In Hollywood studio parlance, there are above-the-line jobs and below-the-line jobs. If you’re above the line, that means you’re irreplaceable. Below the line, you’re an interchangeable part. Producers, directors, and stars are all above the line. Technically, so is the writer — but every screenwriter who has ever suffered in Tinseltown is acutely aware that they are at the bottom of the hierarchy, and likely to be replaced at the whim of their betters. Thus, the cliché of screenwriters as self-pitying wrecks who are too smart for their own good.

Gary Oldman is screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz in David Fincher’s Mank

Mank is the story of one of the greatest wrecks, Herman Mankiewicz, as he works on the screenplay that will become Citizen Kane. It opens with Mank (Gary Oldman) decamping to the desert town of Victorville on an enforced writer’s retreat. He’s practically immobile because of a broken leg, sustained, as we see in the first of many flashbacks, in a car accident, so he’s attended by his housekeeper, Freda (Monika Grossman), while under the watchful eye of his handler, John Houseman (Sam Troughton). He’s just getting settled in when Orson Welles (Tom Burke) informs him the deadline has been shortened from 90 days to 60 days, so he’d better get started dictating to his secretary, Rita Alexander (Lily Collins).

Mank’s script, called simply “American,” is about one of the most powerful people in the world of 1940: William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance). As a top writer in the studio system of the 1930s (Mankiewicz came up with the idea of switching between black and white and color in The Wizard of Oz), he was a close friend of Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried), a decidedly non-stupid Hollywood starlet who was Hearst’s mistress. As a frequent guest at Hearst Castle in San Simeon, Mank had a front row seat to the court intrigue of one of the richest men in the world as the Depression ravaged his fortune and political winds swirled around him.

Oldman, Arliss Howard, and Tom Pelphrey

As the flashbacks pile up, we see some of the real-life events that were inspirations for incidents in Citizen Kane. Most importantly, it was Hearst’s sudden turn from progressive supporter of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to stealth backer of California Republican gubernatorial candidate Frank Merriam over his former friend Upton Sinclair (Bill Nye) that rankled Mank.

When word spreads in Hollywood that upstart outsider Welles and old-school insider Mank were teaming up to take on Hearst, the knives come out. Everyone from his brother Joe (Tom Pelphrey) to Marion herself tries to stop Mank from committing career suicide. But even his worst enemies agree that the radical 327-page script is a masterpiece.

Director David Fincher has been trying to make Mank since the late 1990s from a screenplay by his late father Jack Fincher. The Finchers’ film finds direct inspiration in the subject, taking Citizen Kane‘s nonlinear structure of nestled flashbacks and Mankiewicz’s dialogue-driven approach to drama. Mank’s high-contrast black-and-white photography and rapid-fire wit would fit the bill if the picture was produced in 1940. Oldman is perfection as Mank, whose hard living makes him look 44 going on 74. He’s a raging alcoholic who cheekily sneaks booze onto the teetotaling ranch in a crate labeled “support devices.” He’s usually, as he ruefully observes, “the smartest man in the room,” and his lack of filter often leads to catastrophe.

The rest of the cast is equal to the task, led by Arliss Howard as chief Hearst sycophant Louis B. Mayer. The MGM head honcho gets a stunning walk-and-talk intro as he strides through the lot on the way to tell his entire company he’s cutting their pay. Howard plays Mayer as the inspiration for Mr. Bernstein in Citizen Kane, but aside from a slight Brooklyn accent, Amanda Seyfried’s Marion Davies is nothing like the hapless Susan Alexander Kane.

Mank and Marion recognize each other as alcoholic fellow travelers, existing only in this world of extravagant wealth by blind luck. They bond on a walk through the Hearst Castle zoo after being ejected from a tense dinner party conversation where the super-rich discuss the comparative threats of Soviet communism and Nazi fascism.

That’s the scene where Mank rises above film nerd-vana to deep contemporary relevance. Mank has a front row seat (and not a little responsibility) for the confluence of money and propaganda that still dominates our politics today. Donald Trump has said his favorite movie is Citizen Kane. When Kane runs for governor of New York, his biggest promise is to “lock up” his opponent. When Kane loses, his newspapers’ headlines declare “Fraud at the Polls!”

Mank is streaming on Netflix.

This afternoon I popped the old Citizen Kane DVD in the Blu Ray player and sat down to fast forward through to the parts about politics. I ended up watching the whole thing, not only because it’s the legit best movie ever made, but also because it’s pretty much all about politics.

It’s the sign of a great work of art that you can see something new in it every time you experience it. Orson Welles’ masterpiece is film’s version of the Great American Novel; it’s the story of a specific person who stands in for something in the national character. Charles Foster Kane is the national character, in the same way the bald eagle is the national bird.

If Welles’ only involvement with Citizen Kane was as its lead actor, it would still be one of the greatest achievements in film history. Welles plays Kane at almost every stage of his life. (Even Buddy Swan, the young actor who plays Charlie at age 8, bears a frightening resemblance to Welles.) The details of Kane’s life are famously based on newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, but I think Welles was going for something deeper than a thinly veiled biopic. Citizen Kane is about the kind of person who would seek power.

One of the great gifts George Washington gave to American democracy is the reverence for Cincinnatus, the Roman general who, when given dictatorial powers over the Roman Republic, resolved the military emergency, handed in his crown, and returned to his farm. The most worthy leaders, we believe, should be those who serve reluctantly, recognizing the corrosive effect of power on the soul of the wielder.

Kane is not like that. Upon taking control of his newspaper, the fictional New York Inquirer, his first act is to lower the editorial standards and print sensation instead of what the stodgy old staff considers news. Later, he abuses the power of the press to drum up a fake war that becomes a real war—his motivation, like Hearst’s, seems to be beyond just selling more newspapers. Kane starts a war just to see if he can.

But, just like Roger Ailes’ fall from the pinnacle of Fox News, his lax journalistic standards come back to haunt him. When Kane runs for Governor of New York, he claims to be, as his best friend Leland (Joseph Cotton in a performance for the ages) says, “the great liberal.” Next we see Kane giving a stump speech in a scene that would not look too out of place on the 2016 campaign trail, and his pitch is pure demagoguery. He claims to be fighting for the “underpaid and underfed”, but his only real policy pledge is to arrest and prosecute his political opponent, the allegedly corrupt Governor Jim Gettys (Ray Collins). But Kane the political dilettante gets his comeuppance that very night, when Gettys reveals what a real cutthroat politician can do. Kane has been having a typically reckless affair with the cabaret singer Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore), and Gettys gives him a taste of his own medicine by ensuring the story gets splashed on every newspaper in the state that Kane doesn’t own, generating delightfully written headlines such as “Entrapped By Wife As Love Pirate, Kane Refuses to Quit Race.”

Like Donald Trump, Kane is a spoiled rich boy. “I always gagged on the silver spoon,” the unreflective Kane says as he is being deposed as the head of his media empire. “If I hadn’t been rich, I could have been a really great man.”

Leland says all Kane ever wanted was love, and he ran for office to get the voters to love him. Like most politicians, his personality is built over a bottomless hole that can never be filled. Welles, however, is hinting at something more complex. The last time we see Kane in the film, he’s a beaten man, walking between two mirrors that create an infinity of reflections, as if his relentlessly self-constructed identity has been shattered, and all that is left are shards of imperfect images. Ambition is our national malady, and too much is inevitably fatal. As Kane himself says in the opening newsreel detailing the events of his life, “I am, have been, and always will be one thing: An American.”