Mank

Mank is a biopic on the life of Herman J Mankiewicz (aka Mank), best known as the co-writer of the seminal Citizen Kane. Mank faced both personal challenges and creative differences with the director and producer of Citizen Kane, Orson Wells; this film promises to explore both.

The film is highly anticipated as a return for David Fincher, whose last film was 2014’s critically lauded Gone Girl. Gary Oldman features in the titular role; his acting acumen serves as a conduit into the kind of person Mank may well have been just as much as Mank’s life serves as a survey of 1930s Hollywood.

We get just a moment of the film’s score, headed up by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, a duo whose popularity as Nine Inch Nails is arguably contested by their success in the film-scoring business, notably with their Oscar win for The Social Network in 2010.

Mank is devoted to its subject on a technical level: The film was shot on monochrome cinema cameras; there is no colourized version. Similarly, while unconfirmed, it wouldn't be surprising to learn that at least parts of Mank’s score was recorded with 1930s technology. It certainly sounds that way initially in the trailer, with the soft crackle of imperfect analog tape running alongside a positively antique Netflix logo in obvious homage to RKO.

The first twenty-five seconds revel in a macabre, chromatically meandering set of strings that wouldn't sound out of place in a Shostakovich piece, but also a sly reference to the sick-bed flash-back opening of Citizen Kane. This soundscape is suddenly usurped by a jazzy, big-band brassy flourish and a wipe apropos to 30s cinema—it yanks the audioviewer, in both screen and sound, further from the diegesis by using conventions now more obviously signalling vintage film, becoming less immersive. As we will hear, however, this is more an acknowledgement of shortcomings that serves to juxtapose with the “real” Mank later in the trailer.

Similarly, we're taken back out at 1:05 with another wipe coinciding with the smack of a fly. The sequence that follows is both slow-burning and incessant in its intensity, much perhaps like Mank’s life. Beneath, Ross and Reznor’s score breathes labouriously, gently oscillating between the parallel major and minor key in stepwise piano motions. It holds an epic sense of scale while retaining subtlety and restraint, as if to acknowledge the utter futility of the challenge of conveying a life in two hours and change—much less the irony and interest in attempting this with a screenwriter. Notice at 1:32 the concurrent screaming, fitting too perfectly alongside the line “who do you think you are?”—a punctuation that sustains interest while conjuring multiple possibilities about its meaning. Here we see parallels with Kane again through the waning sense of self-confidence and the various demons that clearly troubled Mank.

The next minute or so is marked by a steady beat of images that fade in and out from view, with dialogue cut in a way that there is little or no reprieve—no space to consider one line before it moves to the next. Coupled with the score, which slowly but convincingly builds its strength with each repetition of its harmonic theme, the trailer conveys a sense of excess and builds its argument that there is so much more to Mank’s life than can fit within the bounds of either what was captured during his life.

At 2:03, the falling bottle is a visual reference to the dying Kane dropping the snow globe in the original movie. Notice also the fairly clear synch between the actors’ “antiqued” title cards at 2:08: Gary Oldman and “second chance”; Amanda Seyfried and “cannot capture”.

On that note, the crux of it arrives at 2:10 as Oldman intones, “you cannot capture a man’s entire life in two hours; all you can hope is to leave the impression of one.” These are the words the trailer appears to live by. The strings are swelling and climbing upwards and upwards at this point, ever-building, never resolving. It would have been dangerously easy to commit to such an editing style and have it slide into a monotonous march of scenes and lines. However, the occasional audiovisual punctuation or counterpoint, coupled with the subversive dynamic of a slow-building score, coalesce for a gripping result.

Mank arrives in select theatres before streaming on Netflix December 4th.

— Curtis Perry