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Mank

Posted on December 5, 2020December 29, 2020 by Village Vidiot

  “Mank,” December 5, 2020, Netflix.  Who really did write Citizen Kane?   Was it Orson Welles, boy genius?  Or his fellow original screenplay Oscar winner, quick-witted, alcoholic playwright and screenwriter, Herman Mankiewicz?  Or was it a true collaboration?  Mankiewicz, or “Mank,” (an excellent, boozy, and burned-out Gary Oldman) is certainly director David Fincher and his father’s original screenplay’s choice for that honor.  Not who made the film, of course, that’s Welles, and its left to us what matters more.  But this look at Hollywood and both cinema and social politics is presented from the perspective and point of view of Mank, a remarkably talented and self-destructive drunk.  The film combines a host of conceits.  Shot in crystalline black and white (like Kane), it mimics the scriptwriter’s use of nonlinear presentation in Kane itself.  It relies on scenes that ever so consciously ape the manic verbal stylings of Hollywood comedies of the day and then lets us watch the making of the script, studio politics, and the lives of real figures at a more human pace.  These historical figures include Kane subject William Randolph Hearst, his partner Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfreid in a lovely turn and by all historical and critical analysis not the model for Kane’s paramour), Louis B. Mayer (a nasty, corrupt, exploitative streetfighter of a studio exec), and Mank’s brother Joseph Mankiewicz who became an even more prominent figure than his brother.  Upton Sinclair’s EPIC and quixotic campaign for economic justice in California provides the vehicle for demonstrating Mank’s heart and cynicism.  It’s a fascinating and creative mélange.

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