Mank

They do make them like they used to

The timing of the release of Mank on Netflix could not be more poignant. A movie about the writing of Citizen Kane, which some consider the greatest American movie ever made, if not the greatest movie of all time, Mank comes at a time when the communal experience of watching movies on a big screen, in a dark theater, surrounded by strangers, seems mortally imperiled.

Movies are over 100 years old but their demise has been predicted since the advent of the talkies. Something is always threatening the end of movies as we know them. First, it was sound, then it was TV, then it was increasingly small screens, and now it’s COVID-19, which together with streaming services, conspire to finally put a nail in the coffin of people huddling together in the dark to cry, laugh, and scream.

Among a sea of mostly garish Netflix offerings, Mank is defiantly classy and nostalgic. To begin with, it is in gorgeous black and white, which already is taboo for most audiences. What’s more, it is an homage to the classic Hollywood movies of the 1930s and 40s, which to young audiences must seem like antediluvian fossils. David Fincher, one of the coolest of contemporary directors, whose movies have always been stylishly of the moment, got the very current Trent Reznor (formerly of Nine Inch Nails) and Atticus Ross to write a lush film score in the style of the great film…