I am out of town right now, visiting family in anticipation of tomorrow night’s Academy Awards show. I might have mentioned something about it in a previous diatribe. Or two. Regardless, this evening we sat down for one last movie-watching experience before the ceremony. And for our final film of the 2020 – 2021 movie season, we watched Mank.
This is a period piece set primarily in 1930’s Hollywood, and centers around Herman Mankiewicz, in the process of writing the screenplay for the film Citizen Cane. It is the tale of a writer struggling with his craft, with an artist at odds with the world around him, and with a man struggling with addiction. Mank is entirely in black and white, and is without a doubt an actor’s film—this is the sort of movie that the Hollywood loves to nominate, as it self-glorifies Hollywood, but it is also a superb movie and an acting tour de force. Gary Oldman, as Mankiewicz, is once again chameleonic in his performance, and two of the three women in his life—Amanda Seyfried as actress / arm-candy Marion Davies and Lily Collins as Mankiewicz’s personal secretary Rita Alexander (the third, Tuppence Middleton as his wife Sara Mankiewicz, is no less smolderingly powerful despite apparently meriting less attention from the Academy)—are commanding in their own influence, shaping and care of the man whose name is at the center of this story.
In the end, Mank is not the sort of film I would have watched if it were not an Oscar nominee on the night before the Oscars. But I have zero regrets doing so. It is expertly directed, acted and written, and it may not be the most talked-about film of the next ten years (unless it wins the Best Picture, of course), it is a movie worth watching regardless.
9.0 – 10.0
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The Story Yet Untold
The passion of the story yet
Within the heart untold—
A quick and dirty novelette
Or franchise to be sold—
Can seem a tiny ember with
A solar heart that burns,
A poem soon to be a myth
Or lesson someone learns.
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Written while listening to Enigma’s MCMXC aD (1990).
The Artist and the Engineer 