David Fincher's 'Mank' Review Thread
Rotten Tomatoes: 94% (33 reviews) with 8.40 in average rating
Metacritic: 76/100 (20 critics)
As with other movies, the scores are set to change as time passes. Meanwhile, I'll post some short reviews on the movie.
Written by Jack Fincher, who is David Fincher’s (late) father, “Mank” is a lusciously evocative, verbally sharp-angled movie that’s never less than engrossing. Yet given that it’s about the creation of “Citizen Kane,” there’s a way that it’s almost more inside baseball than it needed to be. And that could limit its appeal.
However much credit Mankiewicz deserves for “Kane,” Fincher’s remarkable movie makes a compelling argument for appreciating the prescience behind its conception. His life had a rough ending, but the movie about it gives him one last bitter laugh.
-Eric Kohn, IndieWire: B+
It’s possible to go into a kind of trance at just how beautiful this film looks, a ravishing display created by cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt and production designer Donald Graham Burt, with costumes by Trish Summerville. It’s a view of Hollywood that is unfashionable in many ways – the current view is probably more in line with Ryan Murphy’s miniseries Hollywood, which is all about correcting the erasure of anyone outside the white-heterosexual system, and that isn’t really what Mank is about. But what an addictive romantic drama it is, mixing sentimentality with pure rapture.
-Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian: 5/5
It's the visuals that linger here, an entire world of after-images swimming in the brain, from a magnificent artefact that will certainly sweep the boards at next year's Oscars but is, if one is being brutally honest, just a tiny bit cold.
-Kevin Maher, The Times: 4/5
All this is absorbing enough, but if the intention was to instill pathos into the experience of a writer producing his best work for an industry that sickens him and an artist averse to sharing credit, Mank comes up short. This is no fault of Oldman's, who loses himself in the drunken cynicism of a man whose writing is now his only tenuous link to any kind of idealism.
-David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter
The story then becomes less a forensic accounting of a masterpiece than a bittersweet ode to a certain slice of old Hollywood: part love letter, part cautionary tale, and still somehow a mystery.
-Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly: B+
Memorable acting, striking cinematography, and a provocative examination of the nexus between entertainment and media and politics — that’s part of what’s kept the legend of “Citizen Kane” alive for decades, and it’s enough to make “Mank” necessary, if not entirely fulfilling, viewing for film lovers.
Mank is about a lot, and there are times when it feels like a lot, and yet for all of its ambition, there’s something missing at the center of the picture. The emotional punch never lands, and so while Mank has no problem earning the viewer’s respect, it struggles to find our adoration.
Shot in stunning black-and-white, Mank delivers Hollywood in a multitude of greys. Built on a towering performance by Gary Oldman, it’s smart, sophisticated, by turns thrilling and difficult, and amongst Fincher’s best.
-Ian Freer, Empire: 5/5
The reclamation project known as Mank falls short. Even with showy performances from Oldman and Seyfried, and its beautiful craft, the film lacks heart. Because underneath the wisecracks and drunken debauchery, in the face of a sweeping political narrative, there’s scarcely an impression of the man. Rather it says more about the era: When the dreamland power of Hollywood was wielded for terrible political ends, and when many of its brightest minds allowed it to happen. And as we hear the clicking and clacking of metallic keys, a typewriter notating the film’s time-stamped subtitles, we’re meant to imagine it’s Mankiewicz writing his own ending -- the ending this genius-loser never had -- a sentimental fairy-tale conclusion that would make even Louis B. Mayer proud. The sentiment is touching. But Mank spends so long as a distant, cold film, that such tributes feel unearned.
-Robert Daniels, IGN: 6.0 "okay"
The script is punchy and not afraid to lean into melodrama, and Fincher is clearly having fun bringing his father’s words to life. Much of the story here feels lifted from film critic Pauline Kael’s controversial “Raising Kane” essay, which lays all the work of Kane at Mankiewicz’s feet and cuts Welles out of the equation. Several notable people have discredited the essay’s claims, but no matter – it makes for a cracking good yarn. And a great movie. It’s the stuff that dreams are made of, to quote another old Hollywood story from 1941.
-Chris Evangelista, /FILM: 9/10
“You cannot capture a man’s entire life in two hours. All you can hope is to leave the impression of one,” Mank says of the Hearst-ian Kane. The same argument could be made for “Mank,” a wonderful throwback about a flawed figure who took on a hostile era in Hollywood with choice words and major chutzpah.
David Fincher has waited decades to make this movie, but beyond his father’s work I struggle to find his emotional connection with the material. He’s made movies about difficult geniuses before — most notably The Social Network — but otherwise there’s very few of the hallmarks of his best work. As passion projects go, Mank is awfully cold.
-Matt Singer, Screen Crush: 6/10
There is some pleasure in spotting the winks and legends and shout-outs, but as with any biopic, of any figure, you can’t just bank on familiarity— you have to give the unfamiliar viewer (and, considering the platform it’s on, there will be many) reasons to care. By the end of “Mank,” even I wasn’t sure any of this mattered all that much.
-Jason Bailey, The Playlist: C+
I think the most productive way to look at “Mank,” a new film about Hollywood in the 1930s and ‘40s, and about the screenwriter of a particularly famous and iconic work, is to understand it as Fincher’s most playful work.
-Glenn Kenny, RogerEbert.com: 3/4
Citizen Kane conjoins an old-feeling boozer’s shame with a young man’s love of tricks, magic, and shtick; it’s a formally hopeful dramatization of collapse, a contradiction that cuts to the heart of the sort of ambiguities that hound people’s lives. Fincher, who thinks he’s superior to melodrama even if he steps in it anyway, fossilizes such themes rather than dramatizing them.
-Chuck Bowen, Slant: 3/4
PLOT
The story centers on the life of Herman J. Mankiewicz as he wrote Citizen Kane, and the problems that arose with Orson Welles during production and leading up to the film's release.
DIRECTOR
David Fincher
WRITER
Jack Fincher
MUSIC
Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross
CINEMATOGRAPHY
Erik Messerschmidt
EDITOR
Kirk Baxter
Release date:
November 13, 2020 (select theaters)
December 4, 2020 (Netflix)
STARRING
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Gary Oldman as Herman J. Mankiewicz
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Amanda Seyfried as Marion Davies
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Charles Dance as William Randolph Hearst
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Lily Collins as Rita Alexander
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Arliss Howard as Louis B. Mayer
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Tom Pelphrey as Joseph L. Mankiewicz
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Sam Troughton as John Houseman
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Ferdinand Kingsley as Irving Thalberg
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Tuppence Middleton as Sara Mankiewicz
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Tom Burke as Orson Welles
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Joseph Cross as Charles Lederer
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Jamie McShane as Shelly Metcalf
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Toby Leonard Moore as David O. Selznick
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Monika Grossman as Fraulein Freda
Submitted November 07, 2020 at 12:04AM by SanderSo47 https://ift.tt/2GztyUu
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