Wen 丨 Wu Zeyuan
David Finch hasn't released a new film since 2014. His subsequent participation in the series "Psychological Detective" and "Love, Death, Robot" can only be regarded as a pre-dinner dessert for Finch fans, so this new work "Mank" after a gap of six years naturally satisfies everyone's appetite.
But Finch's answer sheet was disappointing. "Mank" HAS AN IMDb rating of 7.4 and a Douban score of 7.7, both of which rank among the worst echelons of Finch's works.
The audience positioning of the film is also more awkward, the mainstream public is difficult to be interested in the Hollywood 30s ukiyo-e and "Citizen Kane" screenwriting process, the academy judges will find that the film wants to talk about too much and too complicated to accurately correspond to the current liberal values, and the film historians who really care about "Mank" will find too many factual flaws in it to take it seriously.
Manke (2020)
So, where does the origin of all this dilemma come from? Director David Finch himself, director father Jack Finch's unsatisfactory script, production company Netflix, or all of the above?
A failed retro performance art
Mank is a standard biographical film, although most of the plot is fictional. The film tells the story of Hollywood screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz and newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, Hearst's actor girlfriend Marion Davis, and production magnate Louis Mankiewicz. The feud between B. Meyer (co-founder of MGM) and Irving Salberg (MGM's production executive) was placed in a time when the Great Depression of the last century, left-wing ideologies were on the rise, and Hollywood speakers remained generally right-wing. It is these character relationships that form the origin of the film history masterpiece "Citizen Kane" written by Mankiewicz and adapted according to Hearst's life.
In it, Manke is undoubtedly a moral conscience character. Although he was an alcoholic, gambler, harsh in his speech, and had a strong tendency to self-loathing, he would not stand idly by when he witnessed injustice. He was willing to provide financial help in the face of destitute set group performances; in the face of the Nazi persecuted Jews, he directly brought more than a hundred villagers from Germany to the United States (although the film only explains this through lines).
The most important part of the film's plot is an incident in which fake news is concocted: with Hearst's funding and at the behest of Meyer and Tällberg, MGM hires professional actors and street wanderers to perform a series of "news films" that slander the leftist politician Upton Sinclair (the original author of "Blood Is Coming").
It was these films that shook voters' views and led Sinclair to lose the California gubernatorial race. Mank is naturally unable to change the tycoons' decisions, but he bluntly expresses his dislike for them and uses Citizen Kane as his ultimate revenge against the corrupt rulers.
The problem is that Mank isn't the kind of character Finch is best at and interested in. From "Seven Deadly Sins" to "Fight Club" to "Social Network" and "Disappearing Lovers", Finch is best at shooting two types of people: one, a highly intelligent and sometimes perverted antisocial personality; and the other, a big person who gradually corrupts in the accumulation of money and power. The protagonists in "Seven Deadly Sins," "Fight Club," and "The Vanished Lover" belong to the former, while Nicholas and Zuckerberg in "Psychogame" and "Social Network" belong to the latter.
The Social Network (2010)
If we make a rough distinction between the characters in "Mank", then the laughing and angry, pretentious Manke himself generally belongs to the former. But what did Manke do to rebel against the system? Most of the time he just indulged in alcohol and witty remarks, and only when he created Citizen Kane did he slightly perk up, giving an account of his conscience and giving a conspicuous middle finger to his disgusted superiors.
But what exactly did he change? Sinclair still lost, Citizen Kane was banned from most theaters, and he himself returned to alcohol after a brief uptick, dying of illness twelve years later. Manke's story is not the rebellious story of the sociopath, nor is it the heroic story of the man with the unbroken conscience. In the end, it is only about the tangled and repressed life of a self-styled literati. This is clearly not the area where Finch is most interested and good at it.
With little interest in the protagonist, Finch focused most of his attention on the video style. The over-focus on style is the worst version of Finch: he controls the rhythm of the image with impeccable smooth photography, editing and scene selection, but in the end, the audience gets only a series of overwhelming information, without any afterglow and soul.
As for the retro black-and-white photography, the deliberate addition of picture grains, the deliberately flat and echoed "old film" sound, and the traces of film rolling, they all became gimmicks in the end, which was very disconnected from the content of the film. It's reminiscent of Quentin's "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood," which is also slightly below its normal level: it's at least a heartfelt love letter to Hollywood in the '60s. "Mank", on the other hand, is completely devoid of emotion and heartbeat.
Finally, it must be mentioned that Gary Oldman's performance and Finch's directing method this time can be described as a seamless fit. He presents Manck's cynicism in a dramatic way, but Manck's integrity and sincerity are missing under Oldman's manneristic acting skills: it is also a soulless performance.
Narrative: A failed parody of Citizen Kane
The script for Mank was written by Finch's late father, Jack Finch, during his lifetime. The structure of the film is somewhat mimicked by Citizen Kane: the story is also progressively presented through complex jumps between timelines. Manke's entanglement with Hearst, Meyer, and Tällberg is gradually revealed in flashbacks: it gives Mank the impetus to write Citizen Kane.
But this narrative is not clever enough. First, it hinders the audience's empathy with the story. There is not much organic emotional connection between the two timelines, and all it does is to pull the viewer away from the progression of the story again and again. Even David Finch himself has self-doubted in interviews: "Is this script a whole, or is it just a feeling of piecing together a series of scenes?" 」
Now it seems that the script of "Mank" clearly belongs to the latter.
Another problem with narrative is that its homage to Citizen Kane is unnecessary. The onion-peeling structure of Citizen Kane is established because Kane's personality is complex and mysterious enough, and his experience is bumpy enough to twist and turn—he is a huge mystery to be solved. And Manke? He's a character you can see through at a glance. Both his world-weariness and self-loathing were clearly written on his face battered by alcohol, and it was clear to everyone that citizen Kane's creation was a flashback to him.
So does such a character need to be presented with a complex narrative structure?
The answer is clearly no.
The script's flaws in the details are even more numerous. Lily Collins plays a completely functional role, even flatter than the law firm trainee in The Social Network and the female secretary in The Darkest Hour.
As for the film's approach to dwarfing legends such as Ben Hecht (screenwriter of "Beauty Plan" and "Scarface"), Charles MacArthur (screenwriter of "Girlfriend Friday"), and Orson Wells (director of "Citizen Kane") in order to elevate Mank's image, it seems a bit inferior. The scene of Wells throwing things in the room in anger over the dispute over the right of attribution is no longer credible to ridiculous degrees.
Netflix: It's still far from the movie
"Mank" is another collaboration between Netflix and Finch. "House of Cards", "Psycho Detective" and "Love, Death, Robots" have established a good cooperative relationship between the two sides. This time Finch for Netflix to hang the commander of the film again, but also a bit of a generation of Netflix to declare war on the old forces of Hollywood. Most of the legendary characters of the classic Hollywood period are portrayed by the film.
Even the legendary producer Selznick, presented as a layman who knew nothing about storytelling, asked his team helplessly in the film, "How do you get the audience back to the theater?" Manke responded with his usual meanness: "It would be better to take the movie to the street and put it away." In the context of the challenges of cinema viewing in 2020, these two lines are more like Netflix's mockery of the traditional industry model.
But does Netflix really have the secret of the movie? Nor is this the case. Needless to say, Netflix has provided unprecedented freedom for many directors, but the end result is that many directors have recently made the most loose and unrestrained works of their careers. Spike Lee's "Blood Five" is a superficial essay, and Martin Scorsese's "The Irishman" is moving, but the age reduction effect is somewhat plastic, and the duration is completely unnecessary. As for Finch's Mank, it is the latest case in this series. Does this have anything to do with Netflix's production level? Quite possibly.
The Oath of Blood Five (2020)
In the essay "Kane's Path to Cultivation", the American film critic Pauline Kyle, in order to attack the theory of film authors who have dominated the critical circle for a long time, uses "Citizen Kane" as an example to try to prove that Orson Wells's contribution to the film's story is far inferior to Manke. Most of Kyle's arguments are inconsistent with the facts and have since been falsified by several scholars. But she's right about one thing: Directors are far from the only contributors to a film, at least for good films.
Because the producers and production companies, like Selznick in "Mank", are all dry eating.