All hail the newest, weirdest, and most hilariously titled Netflix auteur project: Mank, the David Fincher drama set in Hollywood in the early decades of the talkies. If you’re a Finch-head and were expecting Zodiac 2 or a steamy Gone Girl style thriller…well, this is about as far from all that as you can get. It’s hard to have anything but respect for Fincher’s unapologetic embrace of the relative carte blanche provided to him as a famous film director with a streaming deal: Mank is clearly a passion project in its every detail. Absolutely no one who has ever seen a David Fincher movie was asking for or expecting a black-and-white drama about the life of the former New Yorker critic, script fixer, and screenwriter of Citizen Kane, Herman Jacob Mankiewicz.
Even if it doesn’t manage to transcend beyond its elevator pitch very much, it’s still a pretty great, if modest, movie. It offers a compelling sketch of a chameleonic, conflicted, and troubled guy who hobnobbed with and befriended the moneyed class that he often sent up in his writing. His witty dissent during dinner party conversation made him a kind of court jester to one of the wealthiest men in America, William Randolph Hearst. Several years past his glory days—warped by alcoholism—we watch Mank get an opportunity to honestly tell the story of Hearst, his old friend, as he experienced it first hand, and turn it into a screenplay which turned into Orson Welles’ revolutionary and incendiary 1941 film Citizen Kane..