Raising Kane

Like I said, we're watching TV on disc and compensating by watching movies on streaming. This seems wrong to me in some way, but it did let us watch Mank (2020). Directed by Fincher, it stars Gary Oldman as Herman Mankiewicz as he writes Citizen Kane, with and for Orson Welles.

It starts with Mank breaking his leg in an auto accident, and being moved into an isolated ranch with a nurse and secretary to recuperate and write. Tom Burke as Orson Welles leaves him with a case of booze, but it turns out to be laced with seconal, so he just passes out when he tries to get drunk. So he will have to write. The script is poetic and convoluted, and his agent thinks it's good but the studio won't accept it. People also think that Kane is too recognizable as William Randolph Hearst, and his mistress Marion Davies.

Intertwined with this story is a series of flashbacks about Hollywood, writers, moguls like Louis B. Meyer and Irving Thalberg and Hearst and Davies. Amanda Seyfried (Needy from Jennifer's Body) plays Davies as a brassy blonde with a Bronx accent. She is also smarter than she looks, even if socially awkward sometimes. She forms a bond with Mank, which his wife assures us is platonic. There is also some socially conscious stuff about Upton Sinclair's run for governor of California.

It all culminates in a scene where a very drunk Mank pitches a movie about a rich man who loves a beautiful woman, and loses it all trying to control her. He makes this pitch at San Simeon, to Hearst (Charles Dance), L.B. Meyer, and assembled crowd, in front of a Xanadu-esque fireplace. Hearst gently pitches him out the door. 

It's a good tale, told well, in beautiful classic Hollywood black and white. It was written by David Fincher's father, Jack Fincher, who did not live to see it made. I have one complaint: There is so much old Hollywood in the movie. So many classic anecdotes (the "millions to be made and the competition are all idiots" telegram, the Marx Brothers ruining Thalberg's office) and characters (a writer's room with recognizable imitators of George S. Kaufmann, Sid Perelman, Ben Hecht and about 5 others), Charlie Chaplin playing piano and making Hitler moustache jokes... It's great if you like that stuff, and I do. But It might be too much. If it were a frothy story and a lot of Hollywood insider stuff, or a heavy story with an old Hollywood feel, I might have liked it better. Although Once Upon a Time in Hollywood mixed the two pretty successfully.