Mank (David Fincher) (Patreon)

THIS REVIEW IS EMBARGOED. SO KEEP IT IN THE FAMILY, PLEASE.

Much like this year's major sports championships, the 2020 Oscars will go down in the logbooks with an asterisk by the results, a historical notation of a big, unknowable What If. Despite that fact, the studios and the industry are going to try their best to normalize the awards, since there is a lot of money riding on these prestige pictures. But the complicating factor -- that the Academy has been forced to change its rules, and now there is no official distinction between, say, Nomadland and Cntl+Alt+Trick/Treat -- means that promotion and positioning will be everything.

There are several films, like Da 5 Bloods and Steve McQueen's "Small Axe" films, that seem poised to make a splash in the year-end sweepstakes, not only because of their quality and critical acclaim, but because they are timely. They intelligently tackle matters of racial injustice, sadly an evergreen topic but one that has been highlighted this year because of the murder of George Floyd, the subsequent protests against police violence, and President Trump's ethno-fascist response to those protests. 

And then, there's Mank. Although I suspect there will be others, this is sure to be the highest-profile film of 2020 that will afford Oscar voters what I will call "the cowardly option." It is a well-appointed but hollow period piece of a sort that the Academy loves: a fast-talking, whizbang love letter to the glories of old Hollywoodland, with just enough wiseacre cynicism to look like, in the words of its protagonist, "the smartest guy in the room." David Fincher's direction isn't anonymous exactly, but much as he's done with his least interesting films (Benjamin Button and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), he's chosen to employ the music-video director's gift for pastiche. Here he demonstrates his ability to approximate the visual style of Citizen Kane.

But it lacks a lot of the ostentatious flair, and that seems to be the point. Mank is about Herman Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman), the great screenwriter of Tinseltown who was slated to ghost-write Kane until he demanded a credit from Welles at the last minute. This is, basically, a cinematic rendition of Pauline Kael's anti-Welles, anti-auteurist take on Kane, and so Fincher, working from a script by his late father Jack, aims to dramatize the plight of the writer at the expense of the "dog-faced wunderkind" or whatever other epithet is employed to avoid saying Orson Welles' name too much. The Writers Guild will lap this up.

And it's not as though Mank is incorrect to champion Mankiewicz's cause. It's just a film that is needlessly self-important in doing so, positioning Mank as the Last Honest Man in Hollywood, against spineless suits -- Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard) and especially Irving Thalberg (Ferdinand Kingsley) -- the callow, misguided Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried), Welles the arrogant upstart (Tom Burke) and his lapdog John Houseman (Sam Troughton), and of course, the worst of them all, William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance). 

This would all be merely trifling, not to mention tedious. (One scene between Mank and Davies at San Simeon, in which the old man tries to educate the young woman about studio politics, a sorry attempt at an Aaron Sorkin walk-and-talk, stops the film dead in its tracks.) But Mank aims to secure its Oscar bona fides with obvious dollops of "relevance." The film contains numerous flashbacks to the 1934 California gubernatorial election, when Hearst, with the help of Mayer and Thalberg, derailed Upton Sinclair's democratic-socialist candidacy. There is language that is meant to explicitly echo that used to discredit Bernie Sanders, so the viewer in the know will be duly congratulated for watching history repeat.

But none of this has any bearing on the main point of Mank. If Citizen Kane is really Mankiewicz's revenge against Hearst -- for setting back the sacred cause of reform, as per Mank's own Kane script -- the Finchers' film shows that it's just as likely to be character assassination against someone Mankiewicz thinks bedded a cutie he didn't deserve, or attained a station in life incommensurate to his middling intellect. Does Mank know that, compared with Hearst and Welles, he is Quixote, and not them? For a film that appears to sing the praises of the lowly studio scribe, Mank works overtime to lionize a petty man.