Mank

Mank is a movie about movies which is something the Academy always get excited by. It's about screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz and mainly focuses on him rapidly trying to write the screenplay for Citizen Kane. The film also features many flashbacks, telling the story of how Mank went from a respected screenwriter to an alcoholic Hollywood outcast. The flashbacks reflect the non-liner nature of Mank's script and each scene is preceded by the scene description literally shown on screen in the style of a typewriter.

The film goes further in trying to capture the feeling of films from the 30s and 40s. It was filmed in black and white and intentionally tried to make it look like it was filmed by Citizen Kane cinematographer Gregg Toland. They even used some classic techniques like filming a night scene during daylight. The film also uses mono sound as opposed to stereo and even the soundtrack feels like it is from the era. Technically, it's fair to say this is an impressive film which puts a huge amount of effort to capture the feel of films from the time and manages to achieve that effect. 

There's some excellent performances here too. There's been a fair bit of discussion about Amanda Seyfried and whilst she is good her role is pretty minor. I was actually more impressed by Tom Burke who already looks like Orson Welles but manages to perfectly capture his voice here too. Gary Oldman as the title character is very much the star here and as ever does a fantastic job with a complicated character. I couldn't quite work out how we're supposed to feel about Mank as a viewer. He spends a fair amount of the runtime drunk and is pretty horrible at times yet he is also shown to be a moral man who attempts to fight for what he believes in. There's a real tragedy about him which Oldman brings to the fore.

Despite all this, I didn't love the film. I think it really suffers from pacing issues, especially at the start. It just juts around frantically and it takes a while before you have any idea what's going on, replicating the feeling of tuning into a film half way through and trying to work out what's going on. I think it's a failure of non-linear narrative and some scenes could have done with shifting around- it would have been much better if we'd have had more of an idea of why Mank was in that house writing a script before we saw him there. This pacing issue meant that the first half is also quite dull and it requires an effort to get to about the half-way point before you finally become engaged with the film.

Certainly well done in terms of replicating the style of the era and an excellent central performance but the script could have done with some tidying up to make the film flow as well as it ought to.