How a great movie was written

    

     In 1940, screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz found himself sequestered in Victorville, California. He’d been sent to a remote ranch by Orson Welles to write the screenplay that turned out to be Citizen Kane. 

     Director David Fincher has taken on the task of telling Mankiewicz’s story, a look at a caustically cynical wit who could be amused by Hollywood's emptiness while still knowing how to navigate its treacheries.

     Beautifully filmed in black-and-white by cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt, Mank peers into the corrupted soul of  Hollywood of the early 1940s, a time when the movie industry tried to establish its right-wing bona fides in California even as Hitler rose to power across the Atlantic and the country had yet to recover from the Great Depression.

     Built around an intriguing performance by Gary Oldman as Mankiewicz, the movie sometimes feels like a breezy collection of bold-faced names from yesteryear -- from Ben Hecht to George S. Kaufman to S.J. Perelman. 

    The story eventually draws its energy from tension resulting from Mankiewicz's real-life inspiration for the character of John Foster Kane, none other than media titan William Randolph Hearst, played with surprising subtlety by Charles Dance. 

    Mankiewicz knew Hearst and was a frequent guest at Hearst’s San Simeon retreat, a lavish pleasure palace where Hearst entertained friends and where he and his mistress, Marion Davies (a terrific Amanda Seyfried), dwelled in isolated splendor. Hearst seldom found himself in agreement with Mankiewicz but thought him amusing.

     Working from a script by his late father Jack Fincher, the director includes plenty of famous Mankiewicz bon mots.  After a display of drunken vomiting at a dinner party,  Mankiewicz supposedly excused himself by saying that at least the white wine had come up with the fish. Not quite enough for redemption, but bad, either.

      A quick Google search will show that Mankiewicz looked nothing like Oldman, which may distract aficionados or provide further proof of Oldman’s versatility. Credit Oldman with fashioning a character who tried to balance a need for success and money with an underlying desire to ridicule and dismiss the powerful barons who held the purse strings. 

      Mank will be of particular interest to those familiar with the controversy about who deserves credit for writing Citizen Kane. Officially, Welles and Mankiewicz shared credit, as well as an Academy Award for best screenplay. 

     But in 1971, New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael wrote  a provocative two-part story that awarded the lion’s share of credit to Mankiewicz. Kael’s conclusions have been disputed by others and I have no interest in stepping into waters that have been roiled by deep research and critical partisanship.

     If you care, the movie seems to favor the idea that joint credit for the Kane screenplay was undeserved.

     Notice needs to be taken of the many supporting roles that enliven Mank: Arliss Howard turns up as a doltish Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM; Toby Leonard Moore portrays David O. Selznick, and Ferdinand Kingsley offers his version of Irving Thalberg.

      If you don't know who any of these folks are, Mank may require you to spend some time with Google, which means it's a bit of a film buff's night out.

     What about Welles, you ask? He’s played by Tom Burke, but you won’t see much of him until near the movie’s end when Welles and Mankiewicz fight about who’ll receive credit for the Kane screenplay, which everyone acknowledges to be brilliant.

      Others in the cast deserve at least cursory mention.  Lily Collins portrays Rita Alexander, the British secretary  hired to type the pages Mankiewicz — bed-ridden with a broken leg — dictated. Tuppence Middleton plays Sara Mankiewicz, the writer’s wife, a woman who abided Mank's alcoholism, gambling, and womanizing. Tom Pelphrey appears as Herman’s bother, Joseph — who went on to write and direct any number of memorable movies himself, All About Eve among them.

     Sam Troughton takes a turn as producer John Houseman, who Welles occasionally dispatched to Victorville to check on Mankiewicz’s progress and to monitor his drinking. 

     Perhaps inspired by Kane’s complex structure, Fincher moves his story out of Mankiewicz’s Victorville retreat by flashing back to better and worse times. He highlights Mankiewicz’s relationship with Marion Davies, supposedly the model for the woman Charles Foster Kane embarrassingly attempted to turn into an opera diva in Citizen Kane.

     I’m not sure if Fincher was trying to give the movie topical zing but he spends a fair amount of time on the California 1934 gubernatorial race in which Hollywood's upper echelon rallied to defeat author Upton Sinclair,  the Democratic candidate who was smeared as anti-American and a communist. 

       The screenplay suggests that the race may have marked the  beginning of manufacturing news to seduce a gullible public.

      By making a movie about the making of a movie, Fincher has taken on a gargantuan task  — not to mention that he's dealing with what might be the greatest American movie of them all. Don’t fret. Kane is a far better movie than the movie about Kane and Fincher's effort occasionally goes slack. 

      Citizen Kane remains a great movie even if you know nothing about Hearst or any of the other so-called models for its  characters. Kane may have been of its moment, but it's too damn good to stay there.

       Still, don't sell  Mank short. Fincher takes us back to a time when smart, literary types invaded Hollywood, collected some big paydays, and, in some cases, wrote fine movies. I'm not sure whether to view it as a footnote to a masterwork or an entertainment in its own right, but Fincher's Mank proves a dense, gossipy pleasure.

Titans battle over who'll rule the electric grid

Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse square off in The Current War, an oddity of a movie.

The Current War: Director's Cut is a difficult movie for me to review. Before it was described as "the director's cut," the movie premiered at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival. It was slated to be released by the Weinstein Company, but Harvey Weinstein's #MeToo exposure intervened.

Two years later, the movie found a home with 101 Studios. Director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon reportedly did some re-editing, added scenes and reduced the film's running time. Is it better than the version that played Toronto? I didn't see the movie then, so I can’t say.

I wondered, though, whether Gomez-Rejon (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl) didn't insist on a director's cut so that the movie -- which received a lukewarm reception in Toronto -- could be seen with fresh eyes.

Whatever the case, the movie that now arrives on the nation’s screens is a bit of an oddity.

Gomez-Rejon has tried (boy, has he tried) to make a visionary movie about visionaries, a choice that puts the movie in an odd position: It’s competing with its characters.

The story centers on the battle between Thomas Edison (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Geroge Westinghouse (Michael Shannon), two great names of American invention and commerce. A third revolutionary, Nikola Tesla (Nicholas Hoult) works his way into the story, first as an employee of Edison and later as an ally of Westinghouse.

The great competition concerns a question: Should direct or alternating current be adopted as the US standard. Edison champions direct current; Westinghouse hoists the banner for alternating current. You already know the outcome, so it's difficult to say The Current War generates a great deal of suspense. In the US, alternating current rules.

To the extent that there's more at stake than money and, of course, power, it's worth noting that Edison represents invention in its purest form. Westinghouse takes a more commercially oriented view. Because alternating current was cheaper and could carry over longer distances than direct current, Westinghouse deemed it the better bet.

This is not to say that Edison becomes the movie's hero. He's arrogant and not especially friendly. Instead of making him admirable, his commitment to principle makes him a pain in the butt. And Westinghouse -- though capable of underhanded behavior -- seems genuinely interested in making the world a better place.

It takes an actor as good as Shannon to convey the complexities of Westinghouse's personality and I half wished that the movie had been more about Westinghouse than Edison.

Safe to say that the 19th century battle about the future of electricity isn't easy to dramatize. But it’s Gomez-Rejon's unrelenting commitment to an arty style that makes the movie difficult to embrace: He uses endlessly shifting camera angles, dark lighting, and other self-conscious cinematic gestures in ways that sometimes wall off us off from the story he's trying to tell.

And yet ...

The Current War also creates an atmosphere that is intriguing and strange -- incredibly detailed and yet somehow weirdly unfamiliar.

There isn't much by way of memorable work from the movie's supporting cast.

Tom Holland portrays Samuel Insull, Edison's loyal assistant. Matthew Macfadyen plays J.P. Morgan, a titan of finance who Edison snubs. Tuppence Middleton portrays Edison's wife and Katherine Waterston appears as Marguerite Westinghouse, by far the more interesting of the two spouses.

Gomez-Rajon hints at the dark side of technological advance by introducing the invention of the electric chair, which was supposed to take the cruelty out of capital punishment but which might have made things worse. Both Edison and Westinghouse were compromised by their positions on the use of the chair.

All of this builds toward a competition over who will land the contract to light The Chicago Exposition of 1893, a major coup for whoever wins the day -- or, better put, the night.

Gomez-Rejon whips up some excellent imagery and the story generates interest. And yet ... as I've said ... The Current War isn't so much a failure as a puzzlement, a movie that, in my view, creates too many impediments to its fullest appreciation.

'Jupiter' ascends, Wachowskis sink

A muddled fantasy that pours on the visual stimulation.

Get ready for a list of strange ingredients:

-- Inter-species gene-splicing.
-- Something called "recurrence," a mysterious process that resembles reincarnation.
-- Aliens who want to conquer Earth to boil down the human population in refineries designed to produce a life-extending substance for those greedy aliens.
-- A young woman who cleans toilets in Chicago, and doesn't know that she's actually a queen.

Ok, take a breath. The idea here is to let you know that these and many additional incongruities populate Jupiter Rising, the latest muddle of a movie from the Wachowski siblings (Andy and Lana).

As visually dense as it is dramatically unsophisticated, Jupiter Ascending doesn't so much flop as splatter, sending fragments of story flying toward incoherence.

Any initial excitement about the movie probably stems from the Wachowskis success with the Matrix trilogy, movies that created their fan base. It remains to be seen whether that fan base has sufficient strength to help Jupiter Ascending get off the ground.

A short summary of the plot probably is unavoidable. Mila Kunis plays Jupiter Jones, the daughter of a Russian immigrant family living in Chicago. Various aliens are tracking Jupiter, who happens to have been born with the exact DNA of the late queen of an alien civilization.

Jupiter's royal genetic heritage threatens the offspring of the late queen, a group of ambitious siblings want the Earth for themselves. If Jupiter's genetic heritage allows her to be recognized as a royal, she inherits the Earth.

Take another breath. There's more.

How about a dutiful alien protector? Channing Tatum portrays Caine Wise, a stoic alien warrior with a few wolf genes, a goatee and shoes that allow him to lift off the ground and fly. Think super Air Jordan's. Caine rushes to Jupiter's aid when villainous aliens try to kill her.

Once on the run, Caine introduces Jupiter to Stinger (Sean Bean), an alien with bee genes mixed into his make-up. I can't remember whether it matters, but bees never sting royals, the caste to which an unknowing Jupiter belongs.

Now, about the late queen's competitive offspring, foul creatures that they are:

Balem (Eddie Redmayne) wants the Earth badly. So good in The Theory of Everything, Redmayne here lends his talents to a movie so addled it might have been dubbed The Theory of Absolutely Nothing. Redmayne tries his best to be menacing, interrupting his barely audible whispering with occasional bursts of anger.

Then, there are Kalique (Tuppence Middleton), the sister in the group, and Titus (Douglas Booth), the obsequious brother who tries to advance his cause by staging a ceremonial marriage to Jupiter in some intergalactic cathedral.

Meanwhile -- and there are a lot of meanwhiles in Jupiter Ascending -- Jupiter falls for Caine. He resists her because he knows that no lowly gene-spliced guy can hope to aspire to romance with a royal.

Perhaps trying to emulate the episodic leaps of a Star Wars movie, the Wachowskis shift the action from Jupiter to other locations without establishing much sense of where the hell they're dragging us, and the action set pieces extend beyond any reasonably supportable length.

At one point, Jupiter must establish her legitimacy by obtaining some sort of official validation, a process that enables the Wachowskis to assemble a mini-satire on bureaucracy that boasts a cameo from Terry Gilliam. Gilliam's no stranger to visually bloated movies himself -- although, he's better at it than the Wachowskis. Remember Brazil?

As Jupiter, Kunis brings little to the role. Tatum, who knows how to give a real performance (see Foxcatcher), isn't asked to do much beyond striking a heroic pose. He battles strange looking creatures and pretends as if he's flying through he air in an ice-skater's crouch.

Now, if Jupiter Ascending were a flat-out comedy, its visuals might be more interesting. But as a bit of sic-fi that aspires to Dune-like complexity, it lacks enough consistency to be taken seriously.

Ornate spaceships, for example, pass in review like floating art objects. They seem unrelated to any plausible technology.

To be fair, I did spend some time wondering how the Wachowskis achieved some of the movie's more impressive effects, but I spent even more time wondering why they had bothered to create them in the first place.

It would be wrong to suggest that the Wachowskis suffer from some horrible talent deficit: It's more apt to say that as writer/directors, they make fabulous production designers.