That little girl knows we shouldn t be gathering. HAPPIEST SEASON. Having made no secret of my childlike but abiding love of Christmas movies and despite our conventional notions of time and meaningful dates of demarcation having slipped away in 2020, I feel compelled to watch them. Maybe it s a passive version of the denial that has led swaths of the populace to wantonly infect each other, maybe a minor act of nostalgia hard to say. But the tree is trimmed, stockings by the chimney (not far from a similar display of masks), the door is bolted and I m watching holiday movies.
Mank, directed by David Fincher (
Se7en, Fight Club, Zodiac, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Gone Girl) from a 1994 screenplay written by his late father, Jack Fincher, is a biographical drama about American screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz and his role, or purported role, in the creation of
Citizen Kane (1941), the first film directed by and featuring Orson Welles. It is a Netflix Original film.
Much can be said about this subject, but we will have to limit ourselves.
Amanda Seyfried and Gary Oldman in
Mank
An initial title in
Mank informs us that Welles was brought to Hollywood in 1940 at the age of 24 by a struggling RKO Pictures and “given absolute creative autonomy, would suffer no oversight, and could make any movie, about any subject, with any collaborator he wished…”
Mank: Sole author or just another citizen in Welles army?
No matter how lofty one’s stature as an artist or how impeccable one’s list of accomplishments, there will always be someone out there sporting a pair of steel-toed loafers for the soul (and sole) purpose of booting a deity from the Pantheon. ‘Tippi’ Hedren built a career off of bad-mouthing Alfred Hitchcock. Reviews of Jerry Lewis’ movies read like critical contract killings. But not even the
National Enquirer could have concocted a slam as spurious and mean-spirited as the one Pauline Kael leveled against Orson Welles. And David Fincher’s