Mank Reviews

When I first heard about this project, I have to admit I wasn’t really excited. On the other hand, I have always been a big fan of David Fincher so I was still eager to check it out, especially since it had been 6 long years since he had delivered his last directing effort. Well, unfortunately, even though I really admired the work done, to be honest, I can’t say I was really blown by the end-result though. I mean, as usual with this director, it was visually really impressive and I loved the way he tried to reproduce the vibe of a movie from the same time period. Furthermore, Herman Mankiewicz was an interesting character and Gary Oldman gave another really strong performance. In fact, the first issue was already the fact that, beside Mankiewicz, none of the other characters were developed whatsoever. However, the biggest problem was that, even though this movie was obviously a passion project for Fincher (it was even written by his father years ago), it was interesting at best but never really fascinating, I’m afraid. In a sense, you could compare it to ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ which was basically Tarantino’s love songs to the end-60’s Hollywood, in this case, Fincher brought us back to the 1930's Hollywood with his meticulous attention to the details but, just like with Tarantino’s acclaimed opus, I just didn’t care much like they both did. Furthermore, concerning the conception of ‘Citizen Kane’, it didn’t go really deep after all. I mean, basically, Mankiewicz locked himself up in some lodge in the middle of nowhere and delivered one of the best screenplays ever written, that’s it. Then, they gave us a very long succession of people passing by advising him to drop this project but, of course, that didn’t happen, so it was hardly interesting either. Finally, it seems that this movie was also some kind of jab towards Orson Welles. Basically, they argued that Welles was not such a wunderkind after all because he wasn’t the only one responsible for ‘Citizen Kane’ success but I thought it was rather baseless. Obviously, Welles didn’t make ‘Citizen Kane’ all by himself but, for example, even if Paul Schrader did write ‘Taxi Driver’ and ‘Raging Bull’ and did an amazing job, these 2 movies will always be considered as Martin Scorsese’s masterpieces nonetheless. Anyway, to conclude, even if I didn’t care much the material, it was still another fine directing effort by David Fincher and only therefore, the damned thing is still definitely worth a look.