Gary Oldman plays cynical screenwriter Herman J Mankiewicz in a gorgeously shot film that both revels in Hollywood’s golden age and exposes its corruption
David Fincher has dreamed the life of
Hollywood screenwriter Herman J Mankiewicz; the result looks gorgeous, and sounds gorgeous. It’s a swooning monochrome fabrication of exactly the kind of golden-age Hollywood picture of the 30s and 40s that Mankiewicz worked on, sometimes without billing, until he grabbed a chance to create an authentic masterpiece in 1941: Citizen Kane. He finally accepted a quarrelsome co-writing credit with Orson Welles, sharing with him the film’s one Oscar, for best original screenplay. Apart from everything else, Mankiewicz helped to create a cottage industry in the world of criticism: in a famous contrarian essay of 1971 Pauline Kael declared the praise for Citizen Kane really belonged with unsung Mankiewicz – thus tweaking the nose of certain macho-auteurist male critics.
Gary Oldman plays Mankiewicz, all bleary cynicism, dishevelled hair, acid wisecracks and acid reflux from the alcohol, often dictating the script of Kane from an invalid’s bed (thus weirdly reminding you of his performance as Churchill). Tuppence Middleton gives a shrewd, affectionate performance as his long-suffering wife Susan. Marion Davies – with whom Mankiewicz was acquainted via his connection with Davies’s nephew, the screenwriter Charles Lederer – is played by Amanda Seyfried and her sugar-daddy boyfriend William Randolph Hearst, the bloated old media plutocrat and Kane-model himself, is played by Charles Dance, who is a rather sleeker figure than the original. Tom Burke plays Welles in cameo. It’s a heartfelt, irresistibly watchable film, which incidentally serves up a quasi-Rosebud theory about the genesis of Kane.