Mank (2020)

This movie is 45 minutes too long, and that makes it hard to watch for all but the hard-core Hollywood fans to watch, and while its camera work and the black and white format might seem like it is a love letter to old time movie making, it is not that either. It is a well acted but rather unromantic look at the man who is credited with writing the screenplay for Citizen Kane. Herman Mankiewicz, known as Mank, was apparently a talented writer back in the day when a screenplay wirter would be expected to produce a number of works a year, on the payroll of one major studio or another, and not at liberty to do something that was less than commercially viable. It was the Depression, after all. Mank is also a raging alcoholic, and he is in the midst of a protracted and laregly unsuccessful intervention through out much of the film. He is salted away with a nurse and a minder to write this great masterpiece, while he looks back on his squandered career and gets himself into a bit more trouble. This is an almost entirely fictional account in the play by play sense, but Mank was famously a self-destructive alcoholic who drank himself to death at 55 and Orson Welles clearly took credit for a work that was probably produced by another man, that much seems to be the truth. This is both beautifully done and painful to watch.