Mank, Women and Context
After viewing the new David Fincher film Mank last weekend, I texted this to my buddy:
“The thing that bothered me was the drastic age differential between the men and the women. I didn’t believe for one second that Mank was in his forties or even in his thirties in the flashbacks. And his wife looked like she was about 22 years old, so when she talked about them having been married for 20 years, I almost chuckled.”
I may have almost chuckled, but it’s no laughing matter, as highlighted in the Andrea Towers article for The Wrap. To take nothing away from the fine acting performances of Tuppence Middleton, Lily Collins or Amanda Seyfried, there is a legitimate complaint against Hollywood casting younger women in roles that would be more appropriately acted by older women. Gary Oldman is thirty years older than Middleton, despite their characters having been the same age in real life. Why not have Sara Mankowitz played by a 40-something actress? It harkens back to 1950s Hollywood, when Audrey Hepburn was cast as a love interest alongside actors like Cary Cooper and Humphrey Bogart (ew!), what I imagine was the result of older male casting directors projecting their own desires. Hollywood may have taken a few steps toward a more egalitarian industry, but it still has a long way to go.
Mank also inspired a discussion with my adult children, and we took opposite sides of the argument. I argued that while I enjoyed Mank, it was the very helpful to have the context of having seen Citizen Kane and knowing some of the background of the players involved. My son argued that if you need context to enjoy and understand a movie, then it’s not a good movie; that it fails in its essential role of being a stand-alone piece of art. Yes, context may enhance a film’s enjoyment and understanding, but it shouldn’t be required.
But I wonder about this. After all, could one really understand a Civil War drama like Glory without having some knowledge of American history and the role that slavery has played in shaping it? Or more recently, I wonder how Once Upon a Time in Hollywood played to young people who knew nothing of the Manson murders. They must have been moderately baffled when the film focused so long on Margot Robbie’s Sharon Tate, only to have it lead absolutely nowhere. For me, knowing the real life tragedy had my stomach knotting up at the film’s climax. For others, it must have seemed like a trifle, a comic thriller. This perhaps strengthens my son’s argument, because context may have helped the film, but it wasn’t required. But I have to believe that Tarantino made the film fully expecting his audience to be informed about the Manson murders.
Even non-historical movies benefit from some measure of context, and it’s why cross-dressing comedies like Tootsie or Some Like it Hot might not play as well today as they did at the time. Or why today John Wayne’s character in The Searchers seems outrageously cruel, though at the time his treatment of an American Indian woman was treated as comedy. Or circling back to women and how they’ve been portrayed in Hollywood, many comedies of yesterday fall flat today unless you have some acceptance of the more subservient role women played in decades past.
As for Mank, it gets off on its name-dropping moments, and I think without some knowledge of the past the film must be a rather laborious affair. Some of the name-drops are offered more as a wink to a knowing audience than as necessary ingredients to the film’s storytelling, but they tend to unnecessarily muddy the waters. This is in contract to, say, the way music references enhance character in High Fidelity rather than bogging the film down. Mank falls short for this reason. It’s a good film. It is not a great film.