The Citizen Kane book by Herman J. Kael, Pauline; We...

Welles barely even registers as a character until near the end of the 132-minute film. Still, there's no sense in which the 'point' of Mank is to slam Welles and give all the credit for Kane to Mankiewicz - there's not really any point in the film where it becomes 'the making of Citizen Kane' at all, or where we're meant to find this interesting because the protagonist was involved in the creation of the officially-anointed Best Movie Ever Made.

David, in finally completing his decades-long dream of bringing his father's script to life, has backed down on that aspect of the project a bit - not enough! There is still a final act (of, like, five or six - it is one hell of a cluttered film, with a great deal more plot than is good for it) that has substantial scenes of Welles (played here by Tom Burke as an impatient dilettante with no personal charisma his is the worst performance in a generally well-acted ensemble) acting entitled and pissy in a way that certainly doesn't suggest any real affection for him, or Citizen Kane, or movie directors, or cinema. The Mank screenplay dates to the tail end of that period, when Jack Fincher, father of up-and-coming director David Fincher, wrote a biopic of Mankiewicz that was in large part derived from 'Raising Kane'. The essay had been fully debunked within a few years of its publication, but it dealt a blow to Welles's reputation, as part of the overall critical turn against that director that was conventional wisdom until sometime in the 1990s. Mankiewicz wrote the entirety of that screenplay and was as such the most important creative contributor to the film.

'Raising Kane', if you have the good fortunate not to have read it, is film critic Pauline Kael's 1971 introduction to the published script of Citizen Kane in which she spent 50,000 tendentious, ill-researched words defaming Orson Welles and claiming that Herman J. My first response to Mank has absolutely nothing do with the what we do see in the film, and everything to do with what we don't: this is not, as was rumored, ' Raising Kane: The Movie', and for that I am grateful.

The Citizen Kane book by Herman J. Kael, Pauline; We...