Well, my cinephile friend, here’s a harshly opposite take. We saw two different films.
I wrote this to a friend:
....Thanks Larry.
Well, you only have a solid 20 minutes you’ll never get back. I have about 130 of them. The “craft” and the “techniques” of the movie meant 0 to me. It’s an inert film and I had to force myself to watch it, my trouble being the longer I watched it, the more I felt like I had invested myself in it and, so, was determined to see it through. Generally, it repeats itself, sometimes seems confusing and is dull.
Basically, I just didn't like any of the characters, including Mank. Well, maybe the secretary. And as for the endless smart-alecky one-liners, I think the screen writers need to learn that less is more. I’m unclear what the audience is to get from it, much less its takeaway besides maybe some admiration for its showy craft. It’s such a talky movie, seemingly made by someone insistent on relaying a mess of detail.
So much mushy padding. For me, the film sinks into its abundant windy talking, which immobilizes the movement of things, whether giving us once-(in)famous men or the governor’s race. The cold emotionlessness of it all, matched by the hazy black and white, helps inform the inertness.
I guess Fincher thought he had to pay homage to Citizen Kane by also doing fancy-schmancy, to borrow your words, technical things. But they didn’t mean anything to me in Kane either, a film I dislike. Also, for me, Mank, to repeat, is an exercise in showy inertness. As you say, “a pack of quipping sleazebags mouthing off in choreographed one-liners, fancy-shmancy camera angles, back and forth story line and of course the usually pretentious black and white.”
The film comes across to me overall like a washed out made for TV movie. As for you, the black and white and white doesn’t serve it well for me either, only enhances how maddeningly dull and faded it all is. As you say, the characters are off putting, basically uninteresting when not repulsive.
The scenes between “Mank” and Hearst’s squeeze, Marion Davies, which even the very few panning critics hail, seem staged, uninteresting and unnatural to me, as does the scene when the drunken Mank shocks everybody at Hearst’s costume party with his drunken story of Hearst as a failed Don Quixote. I simply fit that scene into my overall distaste for the movie and the characters.
The whole thing with Upton Sinclair’s shot at becoming governor is distracting.
And how ironic it is that the scene involving the roomful of brilliant wits, Kaufman, Perelman, Hecht and the others, including Mank, falls flatter than a collapsed soufflé. Nothing said by any of them is memorably sharp or witty.
I didn’t fast forward anything. I figured that for whatever penance I have to do in this life, I’d get a head start on it by submitting myself fully to the film’s 2 hours plus...
I’d give it 5.2 out of 10.
P.S. The organ grinder and the monkey parable is big in Mank. He’s the monkey. But, metaphorically, whom does Mank think he forces to play music when he dances? Hearst, it seems, but why? What does Mank falsely imagine he forces Hearst to do, the way the monkey in the parable thinks he forces his guy to play music because he dances? I see 0. Does the parable even work?
As I have it, the point of the parable is that the monkey delusionally thinks the organ grinder plays because he, the monkey, dances when the truth is the reverse. In the movie, near the end, Hearst relays the parable in full text to Mank.
So, I guess it can be seen in different ways in relation to the movie.
As I see it, Mank is the monkey. I’m not sure who the organ grinder is, though I think it’s likely Hearst. (I can see an argument that it’s Welles, and even an argument that Welles is the monkey and Mank is the grinder.) But if Hearst is the organ grinder, I can’t for the life of me see what Mank might falsely think he’s doing that makes Hearst, in the parable’s terms, play music on his organ to Mank’s dancing.
One further thought: maybe there’s a case to be made that Hearst is the monkey thinking he can control Mank, use him for his own entertainment, while Mank, in writing a screenplay for a movie that builds Hearst down into Kane, acknowledged by many to be the greatest movie ever made, in that sense gets the last word...
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