Not quite a year ago, apropos The Irishman and before COVID19, The MacMahonian noted the historical release of a major film by a major director through a streaming platform. Little did The MacMahonian know… the new normal continues and will hopefully coexist with the old maybe as from next fall. In the meantime, Warner Bros has just announced it will with stream most of its major productions for the 2021 season and last Monday, Netflix premiered online the latest David Fincher film, Mank.
Mank being the 11th feature film directed by David Fincher, intense author of neo-noir-tinted psycho-thrillers with occasional whiffs of poetic realism, the most gripping of which arguably Gone Girl (2014), and also of a take on Mark Zuckerberg (The Social Network, 2010) as perceptive as intriguing.
But now, as they say, for something completely different. Or perhaps not. Manz tells the story of Hermann Mankiwiecz (Gary Oldman, switching from inflated Churchillian hystrionics to those of the 40s Hollywood sophisticate variety) case ydk older brother of eponymous major (that's and understatement) director Joseph L, whose most famous work is probably All About Eve (1950), and (back to Mank) screenwriter extraordinaire who inter alia co-authored (though he denied the co-) Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1940)'s screenplay. The film flashes (with subtitles, case you get lost) back and forward between the drunken bed-ridden (due to car crash) “present” (1940), as Mank writes the screenplay, and assorted moments in the 20's and 30 when he stumbles half drunk with Louis B Mayer, William Randolph Hearst and a cast of several other coeval Hollywood notables, excusing himself through life with clever one liners Oscar Wilde might had written for WC Fields.
Reportedly based on a screenplay by David Fincher's father, who died in 2003, Mank may be a labour of love, hence it's apparent heterodoxy in the director's opus. Under the mandatory production design coating – luscious b/w photography (courtesy of Fincher regular Erik Messerschmidt) and dolly shots, ominous Bernard Herrmann-sounding soundtrack – the film mostly rambles aimlessly from one dialogue scene to the next, ambiance and attitude substituting for plot or point, unless it be one man (Mank) standing up to The System, although why and what for remain obscure.
In conclusion, film nostalgia, at least for those of the persuasion, and forceful performances, mainly by Oldman, Arliss Howard playing Mayer and Charles Dance playing Hearst, paliate the films inconclusiveness.