Mank

MANK   ***

David Fincher

2020

IDEA:  A behind-the-scenes look at the career and late life of screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, and the events leading up to the writing of Citizen Kane.

BLURB:  Like many a cinematic portrait of Golden Age Hollywood, Mank approaches Tinseltown from a cockeyed perspective of both appreciation and bone-deep cynicism, paying homage to its creative minds while always remaining aware of the ruthless capitalist apparatus in which they worked. Framed by the lives of two artists who clashed with the system - the titular Citizen Kane writer and, by association, Orson Welles - Mank reveals a Hollywood of contradictory faces, at once accommodating and hostile to bold voices, where ego and politics both make and break art. Fincher depicts this milieu, visually, in a dialectic of uncanny surfaces, evoking the language of 1940s film only to subtly and continuously puncture it through jarringly modern effects, from the grayscale digital sheen of Erik Messerschmidt’s widescreen cinematography to CGI animals and cue marks. As Mank himself ruffles the established ecosystem of the conservative Hollywood status quo, the Finchers expose the Dream Factory’s unwieldy marriage of reality and fantasy, creating a self-consciously slippery biography where truth is shrouded in myth. In its meandering, anecdotal narrative, Mank doesn’t fully find its footing, or seem able to keep up a head of steam before sinking, like Oldman’s prodigiously crapulous Mank, into a muddle of dawdling digressions. Yet at its most lucid, the film channels such juicy, jaundiced screenwriter classics as In a Lonely Place, serving as an acrid reminder of the strained labor - economic, political, social, psychological - that so often drives our entertainment.