Mank

I finally watched it and it's actually very different of what I thought it would be. I imagined it like a moral story of a man betraying a friend in his intent of exhibit a nasty powerful man but it wasn't anything like that. Actually, Marion Davis is portrayed as a dumb bimbo, even if it's mentioned that she is smarter than what people thought. She isn't far away of Welles version of her. Melanie Griffith's version in RKO 281, gave her much more dignity.

Instead it's mostly a political story about powerful men creating "fake news" and naive writers thinking they could confronting them. It's a love letter to the rebellious writer but it presented them as a Don Quixote figures. Mad suicidal figures. It's technically brilliant but probably unsurprisingly it lies heavily on the script. The dialogue is fast, witty and old style Hollywood and, of course, there is a lot of it! I really liked it but I understand why roverpup says the film lacked emotion. The most dramatic conflict it's the fictitious Mank's friend who is forced to do fake documentaries against the candidate he admires and things end tragic for him but it's almost a footnote in the plot. Also why the character who didn't exist is the most emotional of all?! The real life conflicts are almost ignored: Marion doesn't seem to be very worried that she is about to be publicly humiliated by the best movie of ALL TIME!!!; Hearst is so cold that he actually didn't seem to care too much for the insignificant writer (in real life he was very angry!); the wife is, well, just the wife; other famous figures, including Orson Welles, are TBH almost cartoons of real life versions. I think the humanity in the film is almost exclusively in Gary Oldman's performance. He is very vulnerable as an alcoholic who actually doesn't seem to have a clear idea why he is doing the career suicide he is about to commit. Of course, there is some idealism in him but he clearly knows that at the end he will lost against both Hearst and Welles.