Maybe this is not a popular take, but I honestly don’t think this movie is particularly unkind to Orson Welles. At least not as we understand him. Raising Kane was meant to be a takedown of Welles, and by virtue of characterizing his success with the film as unearned, a takedown of everything he did after the fact. Or maybe justification for the lack of success in that arc of his career. It was also fundamentally a rebuke of auteur theory in general, and I really don’t think this movie is trying to have it one way or another in any of these categories. The Orson Welles that has an outburst at the end of this film is not Orson Welles the filmmaker, as we imagine him. He is Orson Welles before making his first film. He is a man in disagreement with a veteran writer about the particulars of their agreement regarding the commissioning of a screenplay. The scene is portraying a frustrated young Welles, not a fraudulent talent after the fact, and I think that’s the major crux of this.

The film doesn’t ever posit that the script that Mank is writing is the shooting script. It’s simply an exploration of the events and people that may have inspired Mank’s first draft. I know there are several elements of this film (including the conversation in the scene in question) that are fudged for the sake of the narrative, and honestly, I don’t care, because this isn’t a Welles takedown flick. If anything, it treats Welles as tangential to the entire narrative, which at that stage in the writing process he pretty much was (if I’m not mistaken, somebody feel free to correct me on this).

The confrontation they have is not the same as say, Zuckerberg and Eduardo in the Social Network, creating a major conflict between the two, it’s simply a bump in the road for Mank and a hitch in Welles’ own plan, because they not only don’t know each other that well but at the end of the day Welles is just not a major player in this story. He’s closer to one of the other founders of Facebook that we see for a brief moment. If this is a hangup for most people, I understand why, but I just don’t think the controversy is warranted, because Fincher isn’t really making any major statement on Welles as a filmmaker or even on his influence on the final film. This isn’t the first time Fincher has fudged historical details and I’m sure it won’t be the last, and I don’t really see what the commotion is all about. If I’m missing something, somebody tell me.