Mank (2020, dir. David Fincher)

I watched Mank on last night and if ever a film should have been dedicated to Pauline Kael, it was this one. For the most part I enjoyed David Fincher’s film, but it fell well short of greatness, and in its own humble way, the 1999 film RKO 128 was a superior take on the making of Citizen Kane. Fincher’s film is well written and acted, but I was less pleased with his decision to shoot the picture in b/w, wishing instead he had homaged John Alonzo’s work on Chinatown rather than Gregg Toland’s on Kane. I visited the Hearst Castle in 2006, and my memory of the property, with its eccentric collection of bric-a-brac, is indelibly bathed in California sunshine, so much so, that when I saw it recreated in monochrome for the film, it felt like a stylistic overdrive. And the cue marks, charming in the first instance, became annoying after the third or fourth appearance - it’s as if David Fincher was treating American Cinema from this era as a sort of quaint museum piece. Also, I didn’t much like how the character of Louis B. Mayer was played, as a sort of diminutive cretin with a particularly sour look on his face, but perhaps I’m thinking too much of Michael Lerner’s studio boss in Barton Fink, who I think personified best the flashy studio-era movie mogul gangster…