Mank (2020, David Fincher) (Patreon)

52/100

Virtually every critic who's written about Mank, even in passing, has noted that Fincher added fake cigarette burns at appropriate intervals, creating the illusion of a film old enough to have been projected on reels (or at least to have been transferred from such a print). There's more to it than that, though. Here's the dialogue being spoken at the moment that the first cigarette burn appears: 

Hecht: "Keep your mouth shut and watch us for your cue, okay?"

Lederer: "Cue?"

Fincher makes sure that the visual cue (to a nonexistent projectionist) appears right on the word "Cue?"—a clever-clever touch that really only exists to invite self-congratulation from viewers who'll catch it. Hell, I'm congratulating myself right now, by noting that others have failed to note the specificity. And far too much of Mank, for my taste, operates on that same nudge-nudge level (though there's also a noxious amount of clunky exposition for newbs, e.g. Mank exclaiming "Thalberg! The boy genius" upon the latter's first appearance). As is often the case with biopics, an impression of somebody's voluminous research being vomited up predominates. Granted, that's more true of Kane-drafting scenes than of the mid-'30s flashbacks, but even the latter often amount to a cinephile trivia quiz: What 1930 (or 1931) film co-written by Joseph L. Mankiewicz stars Jack Oakie as a character nicknamed Cyclone? (A: The Gang Buster. I had to look it up.) And the line between Mank's use of Welles and Vincent D'Onofrio sighing (by way of Maurice LaMarche) "I'm supposed to do a thriller at Universal, but they want Charlton Heston to play a Mexican!" is thinner than one might prefer. (I adore Ed Wood but have never liked that scene.)

I'll allow that the film gets more interesting as it goes along, largely because it shifts substantially away from the Kane authorship question, which appears to have been this project's equivalent of Piper Chapman. (Now there's a reference that invites self-congratulation, as I'm counting on you not just to recognize the character name but to be familiar with Jenji Kohan's reported strategic conception for that show. See how annoying it can be?) One of my notes is the line "Speaking of socialists, how about Upton Sinclair's new book?"; I mistakenly assumed this was yet another example of clumsy era-dropping (for lack of a better term), and was pleasantly surprised when Sinclair's 1934 gubernatorial run subsequently became the narrative focus. But I'd rather have seen a movie explicitly about that subject—which is to say, one that doesn't attempt to derive its primary emotional impact from an offhand remark. (Mankiewicz telling Thalberg "You're not even trying" is so innocuous in the moment that I actually had to go back and rewatch that scene half an hour or so later, as the source of Mank's guilt was unclear to me. And frankly I question whether Herman Mankiewicz was really instrumental in the smear campaign, which would almost certainly have happened anyway.) Nor does Hearst really figure more than tangentially in that power struggle. So while the flashbacks gradually accumulate power, the cross-cutting starts to seem more and more arbitrary, culminating in a climactic juxtaposition between showdowns—Mank-Hearst '37 and Mank-Welles '41—that feels fundamentally meaningless. Also, I stand by my recent less-than-laudatory remarks about Oldman, though he keeps the hamminess to a minimum here. (Tom Pelphrey, Ferdinand Kingsley and Tuppence Middleton are the standouts among the cast; both men were previously unknown to me.) Ultimately, the options in a Twitter poll I found about the cigarette burns sums it up for me. I vote "wank."