By Cinema hasn't given us loads of comedies this year, but then along came Mank. The story of how Herman Mankiewicz eventually – after much arguing, drinking, vomiting and pointed debate about the ethics of 1930s Californian electioneering – wrote Citizen Kane is, for some, the funniest film of 2020.
It's not for the pithy, noirish wise-cracking in Jack Fincher's script, though, or the knowing nods at Citizen Kane itself. The hilarity there maxes out at "fnarr".
No, it's a mixture of the unintentional – having 61-year-old Gary Oldman declare "I'm 43!" late on in the film, for instance – and the kind of highly evolved irony that turns into an exquisitely innocent dumbness.
But why Mank? Well, for one, the name is funny. It sounds like wank. That's one solid laugh there, and there are more to be truffled out too. A load of old Mank. Making a deposit at the Mank bank. I could go on.
But more than anything, people find it very hard not to take the piss out of people being incredibly precious about the craft of filmmaking. The Mank enjoyment Venn diagram is made up of circles marked 'serious David Fincher heads', 'people who want you to know they already liked Citizen Kane', 'Oscars predictions bores', and 'YouTube cinema theory essayists'.
The high-handedness of such a group, real or imagined, is hard to resist lampooning. And, inevitably, any film named after its principal character is liable to be given the Chappie treatment.
What all this means for Mank itself is unclear. It's not like it's any less of an Oscar contender for all of the jokes thrown at it, but it does feel like some kind of spell around it has been broken. Something similar happened to Tenet, another tentpole feature by a well regarded cinéaste's director, though that was much more a general howl from those who couldn't hear or understand what the film was trying to do.
There's no danger of that here, just a general snickering at the back of the classroom about a film which has gone out of its way to make you take it seriously. And the more seriously it tries to make you take it, the funnier it is.
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