Film reviews: Lovingly shot Mank and hard-hitting Romanian doc Collective have a few timely things in common
Themes of propaganda, corruption, and the rise of populist governments speak to the insanity of 2020
Mank screens at the Vancity Theatre starting November 20, and streams via Netflix starting December 4 . Collective screens at the Vancity Theatre starting November 27 and streams via Apple TV starting November 20
WHAT COULD A gorgeously shot black-and-white ode to Hollywood’s golden age and a meticulous documentary about corruption in Romania’s health-care system possibly have in common?
David Fincher’s Mank and Alexander Nanau’s Collective could not be more stylistically different. But though they’re set worlds and decades apart, both new films speak to the insanity flooding the globe in 2020. They smartly touch on the rise of fake news, social divides, corruption, and populist right-wing politics; and both feature elections as a culture-shifting backdrop.
From the minute Mank’s old-school opening credits roll over swoony grey clouds and Chrysler Airflows cruising down a desert road, you know you’re watching a “motion picture”. You’re also witnessing a nostalgic passion project—and a slightly self-indulgent one. Fincher even goes so far as adding old-style cue dots to signify reel changes.
Written by the director’s late father, Jack, the film tells the story of screenwriter Herman “Mank” Mankiewicz, the former playwright and theatre critic who penned 1941’s Citizen Kane.
There’s a moment in Mank when producer John Houseman says of an early version of that script, “The story is so scattered we would need a road map!”. And in one of many inside homages to Citizen Kane, Mank takes the same meandering route to its tale.
The plot bounces back and forth in time. On one hand, Gary Oldman’s Mank is laid up in bed with a broken leg, struggling to write Citizen Kane with a coolly efficient secretary (Lily Collins) taking dictation in a desert retreat. From there, we flash back to his previous years carousing in glory-days Hollywood. Mank was an incorrigible drunk, but he was funny, befriending Golden Age powerbrokers like Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg. He also cozied up with multimillionaire William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance) and Hearst’s much younger girlfriend, platinum-bombshell screen siren Marion Davies (played to silky, sly perfection by Amanda Siefried).
Mank’s growing disillusionment with Hearst and Hollywood’s corruption inspired Citizen Kane, as Fincher slowly reveals here. We see the screenwriter outraged by the fake propaganda films put out by the Hollywood studios (on Hearst’s dime) to discredit socialist author Upton Sinclair in California’s 1934 race for governor—this, during the Depression, on the eve of a war against fascism. Hitler is the stuff of dinner-party small-talk amid the Hollywood elite. (“What’s a concentration camp?” one asks.) It makes you think of the fictional Kane, an isolationist who could care less about the rise of European fascism. The inequality of the old studio system also rankled the screenwriter: one of the film’s best scenes is a tracking shot of Arliss Howard’s hard-nosed Mayer talking business as he strides through the loading bays and studios of MGM, only to switch gears by stepping into a packed auditorium where he begs his employees to take a pay cut.
Vintage-movie buffs will love hanging at San Simeon costume parties and sitting in on old movie sets. The camera fetishizes curlicues of cigarette smoke, and period-perfect Deco lamps, ticking clocks, and satin dresses. But Kane fans might be disappointed at the small role Welles plays in Mank, or how few of his famous fireworks the then-24-year-old wunderkind provides. Others will be put off by Fincher’s insistence on the mannered delivery of the era’s films—including Oldman’s performance. He plays it so sloshed that his witticisms don’t charm the way Mank’s must have, though he does nail the self-loathing of a man who’s constantly putting his foot in his mouth. He also develops a wonderfully oddball, dry bond with Seyfried’s Marion—just one of what Mank’s long-suffering wife calls “silly platonic” relationships with women.
Scored by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, Mank ends up being a mildly amusing, exceedingly talky but lavish visual and sonic revival of a bygone Hollywood. You may need that elusive roadmap to track the deeper socio-political themes, which don’t deliver with anything near the resonance of Rosebud.
Vlad Voiculescu tries to change a system in Collective.
Tragedy, corruption, and elections in Romania
Alexander Nanau’s documentary Collective looks at corruption and propaganda on a much more traumatic scale.
What happened at a nightclub called Colectiv in Bucharest just five years ago still shocks: when someone set off fireworks at the punk-metal band Goodbye to Gravity’s concert, it quickly set off massive flames, and with no proper exits, the fans were trapped. Twenty-seven died on-site that night, but over the ensuing months, dozens more injured were still dying in hospitals. But there’s much more to the deaths than just the lack of building inspections at a basement punk club.
Gaining incredible access and using a sharp eye for detail, Nanau begins to follow a story that will bring down a government, expose a pharmaceutical company, and reveal corruption that flows through the corridors of hospitals and out into offshore banks. The first half of the movie focuses mainly on unassuming sports journalist Catalin Tolontan and his team, who don’t believe the lies that government officials dole out about the tragedy, leaving their regular beats to dig into records and receipts with meticulous gusto. What they uncover is nauseating in its horror. One whistle-blowing, weary-looking doctor reveals not just medical neglect to give you nightmares, but the appalling fact that hospital workers would keep patients’ faces covered with cloth, presumably so they wouldn’t be reminded they were human beings.
The second half of the documentary centres more on a young new health minister named Vlad Voiculescu, part of a recently installed government of technocrats bent on democracy, honesty, and authentic change. But, in a social shift that echoes across the world, from Brazil to Britain, his reforms are met with resistance, and the nationalistic populists threaten to take over again. Suddenly the journalists’ lives might be in danger.
The characters are compelling, but unravelling the crime is necessarily daunting here; Nanau is interested in the unglamorous work of real-life investigative reporting and in the political machinations behind the scenes of press conferences. Their work can be tedious, but you can’t help but admire Tolontan and Voiculescu, the kind of complex characters you’re more likely to meet in fictional films than a nonfiction work like this.
Collective is fascinating but dry—except that Nanau never lets us forget the human cost of the fire. He keeps circling back not just to distraught family members, but to former architect Tedy Ursuleanu; her beauty radiating out from beneath her full-body scars and amputated fingers, she is the subject of a photography exhibit and fundraiser that anchors the film’s bureaucratic and political digging in dignity and emotion.
And as Voiculescu's advances are erased by a new totalitarian regime, you're left wondering where she is right now--and when the next tragedy will happen.
If there's one lesson that binds these two films together, it's that history and politics have a way of repeating themselves. And unfortunately, people often do their best not to learn from mistakes of the past.
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