It was from my wife, who didn't make it through the slow start.
To be fair, she wasn't expecting to. I'd been holding her feet to the fire to watch the movie, and she relented Saturday night. I should probably clarify that. I asked on Friday night when she might want to schedule watching it, and when she hadn't come back to me with a definitive answer by Saturday night, I asked again. She doesn't like to be pressured in these situations, but it had been out a whole week and I wanted to get it watched.
She did what's become a somewhat frequent occurrence for her: She said she'd start the movie and then "peel off" (a phrase we use for going our own way for the evening) if she wasn't feeling it. Often this is a good way for her to ultimately watch the whole movie, but with the two-hour-and-12-minute Mank, I knew it would never happen.
What especially doomed this one, other than that she could certainly think of better ways to spend her Saturday night, was not the length, but Mank itself.
Mank is one of a sizeable number of movies released this year that, through no fault of their own, feel out of sync with the moment we live in. While there are quite a number of movies that have felt quite 2020 -- either because of contagion, quarantine or racial inequality -- that's not exactly what I'm talking about here. Those movies can be too on the nose, or for people like my wife, serve as way too much of a reminder of things she wants a distraction from -- especially on a Saturday night.
And this isn't because Mank doesn't speak to this moment. It does, in a number of ways. Central to the story is a California gubernatorial election between Frank Merriam and Upton Sinclair in 1934, in which Sinclair was branded as a socialist, and Merriam ended up winning. This was allegedly the basis for the political themes of Citizen Kane, which Herman J. Mankiewicz would later write. It was interesting to see that studio execs like Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg were unapologetically and outwardly Republican, a position they would probably never take today, even if it was how they really felt. In the course of defeating Sinclair, MGM secures the services of one of the film's few fictitious characters, Shelly Metcalf, to film newsreels of people telling the camera why they intend to vote for Merriam -- even though half of the people are actors. A liberal just looking for his big break as a director, Metcalf kills himself when he sees what his "fake news" has wrought.
No, the real disassociating element in this movie for my wife was that it dealt with a bunch of old white men squabbling over credit for, and whether to make, a movie taking down another old white man.
Of course, they weren't old at the time. But having the movie set 80 years in the past makes them "old" in another sense, like you'd talk about the concerns of the old world.
I don't want to be reductive when I characterize my wife's perspective on Mank. She believes Citizen Kane is a masterpiece and she could tell right away that this was a handsome and immaculately made film. What's more, she's not the type of person who rejects the canon, literary or cinematic, because it was made largely by white men, either old white men or "old" white men.
But I get it. Now may not be the time. Saturday night specifically was not the time for her to watch Mank, but 2020 -- or even the 21st century -- may also not be the time for her to watch it.
The next thoughts are mine, not hers. In a week in which we have just learned of yet another shooting of a Black man -- who was armed, but with a legal right to carry, and it seems like the only thing he was actually carrying in his hands at the time was a Subway sandwich -- it's just not Mank's time. Even as I was watching and appreciating the film on a technical level, even eventually on a character level, I just couldn't get it out of my head that certain art just feels like a relic this year.
Mank is literally supposed to feel like a relic. My wife noted, with some annoyance, that they put so-called "cigarette burns" on the film stock (remember Fight Club) to fetishistically remind us of period filmmaking. But there are ways that it is also representative of old thought processes that you just can't reconcile in this moment in time.
It remains to be seen how Mank will do at the Oscars, though it is rather pointedly preparing itself for disappointment by reminding us that Citizen Kane was nominated for nine Oscars and won only one -- the one Herman Mankiewicz and Orson Welles fought over. If you were cynical, you'd say that David Fincher was also suggesting that his film is the best of 2020, which means its Oscar victories will be similarly paltry.
The Oscars do love celebrating their own history, though, which is why Mank is certain to get a lot of technical nominations, plus ones for Gary Oldman, Fincher himself, and maybe even Fincher's deceased father, who wrote the script. (And though the script originated years ago and likely underwent significant changes in the interim, it's no surprise, given the film's themes, that Jack Fincher has the only screenwriting credit.)
However, I do hope that in 2020, the Academy sees its way to finding something that better represents what we've been through in 2020. The movie rooting for the triumph of good over fascism isn't really enough for it to be progressive in the way that a 2020 best picture winner will hopefully be. A 2020 best picture really needs to show us the faces, on screen, of people other than just old white men.
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