‘City Hall’: Film Review | Venice 2020
- Frederick Wiseman's documentary "City Hall" offers an in-depth look at the municipal life in Boston under the leadership of inclusive Democratic mayor Martin J. Walsh, highlighting the city's diverse population and commitment to social justice.
At a time when America looks like it's tearing apart at the seams, there's something altogether reassuring — even downright inspiring — about Frederick Wiseman's new documentary, City Hall , which chronicles municipal life in his old hometown of Boston.
Even a native New Yorker like myself, born and bred to despise Boston's sports franchises, clean streets, comparatively lower crime rates and whiff of historical superiority, cannot deny how much Beantown impresses under Wiseman's seasoned gaze, revealing sides of itself that few viewers outside the city may be aware of.
More from The Hollywood Reporter
What we see is a medium-sized, multiethnic metropolis presided over by an inclusive Democratic mayor, Martin J. Walsh (or "Mahty Wahlsh," as he pronounces it in an accent worthy of the Kennedys and Mark Wahl berg), born to working-class immigrants and fully aware of the vital role they play in his city's past, present and future. In a speech that closes out the movie, Walsh touts how he has "put social justice at the heart of our conversation" and built the "most diverse administration in Boston's history."
These words mean something, especially in what feels like an increasingly divided nation. But Wiseman, who at the age of 90 has delivered one of his most overtly political films yet, has never been a director to take his subjects purely at their word. In his sprawling body of work, which encompasses nearly 50 documentaries made in an array of public and private settings — schools, slaughterhouses, courts, parks, racetracks, missile silos, fishing ports, housing projects, welfare offices, libraries and hospices, to name a few — what matters is to show what people do, not just what they say. Wiseman's movies are, above all, about the way our man-made institutions function, focusing on folks working together to keep society up and running.
Or, as Mayor Walsh puts it, "That's democracy in action." Indeed, watching City Hall is sort of like watching an uninterrupted 275 minutes (this is one of Wiseman's longer works, in a filmography famous for its bladder-busting running times) of the C-SPAN channel, if C-SPAN were directed by an auteur with a sense for quotidian truth, beauty and the way people naturally perform when a camera intervenes in their daily lives; what they choose to reveal and not reveal. (I once attended a Wiseman master class at the Cinémathèque in Paris, where, when asked what was the most important thing one needed to make documentaries, he simply answered: "A good bullshit detector.")
In City Hall , the director/bullshit detector accompanies Walsh and other public employees as they strive to keep Boston afloat, and, more encouragingly, to make it a better place to live. This task, like in many Wiseman films ( State Legislature comes to mind), entails lots of scenes where officials discuss seemingly drab issues in drab-looking conference rooms, sometimes with the aid of PowerPoint.
And yet, there's a method to all the mundanity, both structurally and politically. In the first case, Wiseman, who edits his own material, often weeding down hundreds of hours of rushes to a two- to four-hour final cut, provides us with a clear path to understanding how a major city like Boston operates. He begins with a long official discussion of the annual budget, replete with slides and graphs, and then for the rest of the movie we get to see how that $3.32 billion (in 2019) is spent, in "buckets" mostly covering education, public safety and city services. If you're one of those people who like to complain about not knowing where your tax dollars go, then watch City Hall .
In political terms, Wiseman shapes his material to focus primarily on Boston's working-class and minority populations, the latter whom now make up a majority ( in 2019, 44.5 percent of the city was composed of "non-Hispanic whites" ). There are no bankers, biotech engineers or baseball stars featured here, even if we do get to watch a Red Sox victory parade for the 2018 World Series, and then get it rubbed in our faces by Mayor Walsh that there's basically a Red Sox victory parade each year.
City Hall delves deep into what a 21st century American city really looks like, with people of color holding down a majority of public jobs and an increasing number of public positions, even if Walsh himself is white. But as the son of Irish immigrants, he reminds one audience that the Irish suffered a considerable amount of prejudice in their own right when they arrived in Boston during the mid-19th century.
Many of the discussions captured by Wiseman involve how to better integrate and promote such communities, especially when it comes to public housing and job creation. "Are we going to make this a multicultural employment area?" one concerned resident asks the Chinese owners of a cannabis shop, which they're set to open in the neighborhood of Dorchester. In another scene, a speaker — there are no titles in Wiseman films explaining who anyone actually is — explores an "ethnic strategy to wealth creation" regarding the city's sizable Cape Verdean population. And in an earlier sequence where a couple weds at City Hall, Wiseman first shows us the public official conducting the ceremony, then cuts to reveal that she's marrying two women.
Like the director's New York-set In Jackson Heights (2015), City Hall is a paean to a place where folks of different sexual orientations, and from all parts of the world, manage to get together and make things happen. "They feel like they never left their country," is how the owner of a local supermarket chain appeals to his customers, turning their wide diversity into a selling point. For all those people (you know who I'm talking about) trying to paint a picture of Democrat-run cities steeped in crime and chaos, Wiseman's film provides extensive proof that not only is this untrue, but that places like Boston, where the pre-pandemic unemployment rate hovered around 2.5 percent, are, in fact, thriving.
Almost all the sequences in City Hall are filled with such positive vibes, with eager, hardworking people doing their best to make Boston what it is, whether they're involved in garbage collection, fire safety inspection, traffic management, pruning trees or running the whole shebang. As unamusing and occasionally yawn-provoking as that sounds, there are always shades of humor in Wiseman's vision of public affairs. In this film, the prize goes to a scene of Bostonians arguing their way out of parking tickets (or is that pahr king tickets?) at City Hall — and actually getting away with it. Perhaps another reason to move to Beantown.
Yet of all the scenes in this 4.5-hour portrait of transparency and multiculturalism, the two most memorable involve locals gathered together in ceremony. In the first, a group of former soldiers tell their harrowing combat stories on Veterans Day. In the second, Mayor Walsh makes a speech after the national anthem is performed by two members of the Boston Police Department. In both cases, the speakers and singers are white and Black; in the case of the cops, they're also male and female. That these patriotic moments are the film's emotional high points is hardly an accident, and the director clearly uses them to underline how diversity is the true key to the city's success. More than anything, Wiseman is showing us that we are not only watching a portrait of Bostonians, but of Americans, too.
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Out of Competition)
Production companies: Zipporah Films, Puritan Films LLC
Director: Frederick Wiseman
Producers: Frederick Wiseman, Karen Konicek
Director of photography: John Davey
Editor: Frederick Wiseman
Sales: The Party Film Sales
275 minutes
Best of The Hollywood Reporter
