MOVIE DETAILS
Rating: 6.2
Director: Harold Becker
Writer: Ken Lipper, Paul Schrader, Nicholas Pileggi
Star: Al Pacino, John Cusack, Bridget Fonda
Genres: Crime/Drama/Mystery/Thriller
Release Date: February 16, 1996 (United States)
City Hall Trailer
“City Hall” opens with a street shooting similar to the many that happen in big cities every day. A detective and a gangster shoot each other, and both die as does a 6-year-old boy who happened to be playing nearby. The questions are obvious: What was the cop doing meeting one-on-one with the nephew of a top Mafia boss? Where was the backup? Whose bullet killed the kid?
For New York Mayor John Pappas (Al Pacino), this is just another day at City Hall, and he swings into action smoothly enough, trailed by his idealistic young deputy mayor, Kevin Calhoun (John Cusack). He goes to see the cop’s widow. He goes to see the boy’s father. He holds a press conference (“Make sure The Post gets the first question”). He promises an investigation. And he delivers up to a point.
The movie is about what that point is, and what lies beyond it.
Written in part by Nicholas Pileggi, a New York investigative reporter who knows something about such things, and directed by Harold Becker with a strong sense of place and pace, “City Hall” shows how one hand washes another even under a relatively ethical mayor like Pappas, considered presidential timber. Following the paper trail of the dead mobster’s probation report (and we can guess already whose hands are on those papers), Cusack begins to smell something fishy. How did this violent young man get probation instead of hard time? Was it fixed downtown or uptown or across town or just around the corner? We meet some of the other players in this game of craps for souls – political boss Frank Anselmo (Danny Aiello) from Brooklyn; Paul Zapatti (Tony Franciosa), Mafia don from Staten Island whose nephew got himself shot dead.
How these people are connected and why I will leave for you to discover. But there is never any doubt that they are.
The story is seen mostly through the eyes of the Cusack character, a fresh-faced idealist from Louisiana who admires his boss and hopes to learn from him. Much is made by all concerned of political lore handed down through generations; the script reads like a politico’s Bartlett’s, with quotes from Kennedy, Johnson, LaGuardia and Pericles. Some of the talk is awkwardly literary (“There’s only one man who would have made a good probation officer Kafka. And he wasn’t available.”), but it works anyway.
Around this shooting case swirls another matter on the mayor’s desk: a demand by Anselmo for a subway stop and off-ramp in Brooklyn to service a new banking center, and the city’s bid for the next Democratic Convention. Character quirks are explored, including Anselmo’s passion for show tunes composed by Rogers & Hammerstein.
And then there is menschkeit (pronounced “men-schite”), which Pappas explains to his deputy as referring to that bond between two men – what happens between two pairs of hands during a handshake. It doesn’t mean much to Marybeth Cogan (Bridget Fonda), lawyer for the policeman’s association defending dead cop honor bringing widow pension demanding even more when things get hot; she just wants justice served cold, with interest. But eventually Calhoun comes to realize that menschkeit is such an awesome power that it transcends even law itself
“City Hall” is so sprawling that it sometimes feels awkwardly episodic; they say audiences won’t sit still for movies that are “too long,” but this one might have profited by another half hour. There are scenes here so good we want more of them, especially those involving the Brooklyn boss meeting with real estate developers, and the mayor planning strategy.
There are a couple of scenes of great power. One involves the Brooklyn boss coming home for lunch in the middle of the day, his wife expressing her concern through the dish she has cooked, and then the Mafia boss paying an unexpected call. Another is a strong, although curiously tentative, late scene between the mayor and his deputy.
One scene handled with great subtlety involves the mayor’s decision to speak at the funeral of the slain child, in a Harlem church. His advisers tell him he won’t be welcome there. But he goes anyway, and works himself up into an oration of unashamed rhetoric.
It gets a good response from the congregation, but he knows, and his deputy knows, that it was phony and their delicate use of silence and evasion while not discussing it in a limousine taking them away is one of those moments you treasure at serious movies. Pacino and Cusack work well together throughout Pacino as a wise older man who can still be tough when he has to be, Cusack as a younger man eager to learn from him but unwilling to bend his principles.
Many of its parts are so good that “City Hall” should be better than it is. The subplot involving Fonda as an old friend who may have been his lover adds nothing essential to the movie, leads nowhere important and arrives after too much time has passed.
And then there’s an ending where I felt cheated. The movie ends with the election of a man who, in this story, should never have been elected to anything higher than dogcatcher. It’s not that I want all movies to end on down notes; it’s just that they should end on true ones.
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