Mank.

Mank led all films with ten Oscar nominations this year, and after seeing the film (which is on Netflix), my reaction is best summed up by the GIF of Ryan Reynolds saying, “but why?” I think the answer is actually obvious – it’s a talky black-and-white movie about Hollywood, all things the voters find hard to resist – but it doesn’t make it any easier to accept this adequate if somewhat boring movie taking home spots that could have gone to many more deserving films.

Mank is Herman Mankiewicz, a cantankerous screenwriter who was often called in to ‘fix’ scripts by other writers from the 1920s through the 1940s, and who worked with Orson Welles on the script for Citizen Kane, which won them both the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. The film tells the story of the writing of that script, with flashbacks explaining how Mank managed to become persona non grata in much of Hollywood, and his relationship with actress Marion Davies and partnership with her nephew Charles Lederer.

I really enjoy some of Orson Welles’ work, and appreciate Citizen Kane for its artistic merit and historical importance, and I can certainly get into some making-of stories, but I can’t express how little I cared about what was happening on the screen in Mank. It’s the story of a self-destructive white man handed one gift after another only to throw them away via drink, gambling, or just general assholery. It’s also told through a poorly-structured series of flashbacks that bounce around in time so often it makes it too hard to follow when things are happening, especially since Gary Oldman is 20 years older than Mankiewicz was in 1940, when the latter wrote Citizen Kane, and thus nearly 30 years older than Mankiewicz is supposed to be in flashbacks, with no real concession made to the age gap.

Oldman is busy chewing scenery when he isn’t throwing it back up, and it’s especially frustrating because it seems like he took the message the Academy gave him when they named him Best Actor for a lengthy Winston Churchill impression in Darkest Hour as a sign to go even further in this direction, forgetting the actor he showed he could be in Léon, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, or even Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, where he used his scene-chewing ability to far better purpose. Amanda Seyfried earned her first Oscar nomination for her work here as Davies in a role that doesn’t have a lot of screen time and is probably most notable for her accent here; I’m not sure she does much more than Lily Collins does as Mank’s amanuensis Rita, and really none of the women here are that well-written in the first place. The most compelling supporting performance might be Tom Burke’s as Welles; Burke absolutely nails Welles’ voice in a way I found thoroughly distracting (in a good way), although he loses it a little in a critical scene late in the film where he and Mankiewicz feud and break over the final edits and what credit Mank might receive.

Mank is just so self-indulgent and so insular that I couldn’t help but think back to The Artist, which won Best Picture a decade ago for being a black-and-white movie that told everyone how great movies are, as well as for its central gimmick as a mostly-silent film. They’re movies that appeal not just to the presumed interests of Academy voters, but to their identities: Both give movies an importance beyond reality, and, unfortunately, both rely on the assumption that viewers will care far more about inside-baseball stories about how movies are made than they actually do. The best movies about making movies are great movies first that happen to have elements of moviemaking within their stories – Singin’ in the Rain, ostensibly a story about the first talkies, is far more a tale of fakery and integrity, along with a slapdash romance and some great dance numbers; Boogie Nights, a movie about the golden age of porn, is really about this group of misfits and outcasts who form (and break) familial bonds while working in an industry that embraces them for their weirdness. Mank is a movie about a white guy who got more chances than he deserved and drank them all away. It made me want to pour myself a tall one more than it made me want to go watch Citizen Kane or any of the classic films of that era.

As for those nominations, David Fincher getting a Best Director nod over Regina King for One Night in Miami is just … it’s exhausting. And that latter film missing out on Best Picture with two slots still unfilled and Mank getting one of the eight nominations is baffling. I’d have given Gary Oldman’s spot in Best Actor to Dev Patel for David Copperfield, and I think it’s telling that Mank‘s screenwriter, Fincher’s father Jack, didn’t get a nomination for Best Original Screenplay, especially with the intricate flashback sequences making this story harder to follow. Fincher’s done some great work, and this project had to be more personal to him than anything he’s done before, but if this film had received a theatrical release, I bet it would have tanked, and perhaps taken some of its Oscar helium with it.