City Hall

When I write up posts on movies and schedule them, I generally try to do it in such a way that I don't have a couple of movies starring the same person or being in closely related genres coming up in rapid succession. But at the same time, I've got enough extra posts written up that, combining it with moving posts around when the following month's TCM schedule comes out, I sometimes wind up with stuff that in a perfect world I wouldn't have right next to each other. With that in mind, the next post is on a relatively recent (by the standards of my blog) movie set in New York City politics: City Hall.

John Cusack plays Kevin Calhoun. He's a Deputy Mayor in New York under Mayor John Pappas (Al Pacino). Deputy Mayor, in New York, is an appointed, not elected position, and the job duties are, as I understand it, not clearly defined in the legal sense. Kevin is a bright young thing who moved from the South to be someplace more to his liking politically, and thinks he can change the world, which is why he's gotten into politics. He's also an acolyte and admirer of Mayor Pappas and a very capable underling.

One morning, at the same time Pappas is giving a speech in Manhattan, things are happening in the outer boroughs, specifically Brooklyn. Tino Zapatti is a member of one of the Mob families, which of course means that he's involved in crime, although he's not at the top of the food chain. Cops such as Eddie Santos are trying to maintain law and order so that parents can send their children to school safely. All of this is about to come together when Santos and Tino get involved in a shootout. Both of them die, but there's another bullet that hits an innocent bystander: a young boy on his way to school. Worse for the political class is that this is a young black boy, which causes all sorts of political considerations thanks to the class and ethnic divides in New York's seemingly hegemonic Democratic Party. (OK, I don't think political parties are actually named here. But when you get a jurisdiction where one party seems to have a huge majority, the political fight is really within the party.)

Mayor Pappas comes across as someone who's come up from the bottom and made good, and can present himself well to the Manhattan grandees who represent the rich old money, the people who are fine with mass immigration and ethnic strife because that's happening in the outer boroughs instead of their leafy districts. But he also understands the corruption inherent in the system and is willing to make deals with the aldermen and others who are spokesmen for some of the other coalitions within the Party, such as Frank Anselmo (Danny Aiello), who has considerable sway within Brooklyn's Italian-American working class. They've been haggling over how to get a new transportation connection from Brooklyn to Lower Manhattan built, and the shootout between the cops and Mob threatens to complicate that even further.

Marybeth Cogan (Bridget Fonda) is a lawyer for the police union. She has a different view of the corruption that's going on behind the scenes, as she realizes that various parts of the Party are going to try to turn on the cops for their own political benefit. Her job is more to protect Santos, the cop who's been killed, but Santos isn't squeaky clean himself. The closest to squeaky clean, and that's only because he's so darn naïve, is Calhoun, who wants to get to the bottom of what happened in the shooting. He has no idea what he's getting himself into as the conspiracy grows.

City Hall is an interesting movie that, however, probably should have been written as one of those limited-length TV series that you get on cable nowadays. There's a lot going on here for a movie that runs a bit under two hours, and the material I think would have worked better over several hour-long episodes, giving the various subplots time to open up and make character development work.

One thing I did find interesting about City Hall is watching the movie in the light of current-day political developments in the city. I watched the movie before the Party's primary election that put an avowed socialist in the catbird's seat to win the general election in November, although obviously this post didn't get scheduled until well afterward. The current (as of this writing) mayor was rejected by the Party in the wake of conveniently-timed corruption charges made when the mayor squawked about some of the Party's bad policies on a federal level. You don't get to the top without being corrupt, and none of the do-gooders avoid the corruption, either. It's more a question of when internal Party politics results in the so-called do-gooders falling out of favor.

Getting back to the movie City Hall however. As a story of its own it works reasonably well with good enough performances. It's just the sort of thing that feels like it could have been so much better.