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Hollywood used to turn out political potboilers on a regular basis but after Watergate and All the President’s Men the studios got all serious. Movies like The Insider and Syriana play it on the straight and serious and films like City Hall (1996) are rare throwbacks, dramas that run on melodrama and depend on ripping the innocence away from a key character who should already know better.
In this movie that character is New York City Deputy Mayor Kevin Calhoun (John Cusack), a good old Louisiana boy who moved from Washington to work for Mayor John Pappas (Al Pacino) after an inspirational day of testimony on the Hill. Back home in Faraday, he explains at one point to lawyer Marybeth Cogan (Bridget Fonda), politics was a disease every boy caught and Calhoun had a particularly bad case. Bad enough to believe that he could take Pappas to the White House in short order.
The reality the gets in the way is a Homicide detective off the radar taking a meeting with a small time hood–whose uncle is very much the mafia capo–and rather than talk the two trade bullets on a busy Brooklyn street corner. That wouldn’t be so bad, even though both men ended up dead, except that a six year old boy, being walked to school by his blue collar, black father, takes a stray round and also dies.
In the firestorm it turns out that the hood should have been upstate in prison except the mayor’s old law partner (Martin Landau) inexplicably signed off on a probation deal. Calhoun and Corgan, representing the deceased detective’s widow, dig deep and track the corruption through Brooklyn councilman/party boss Frank Anselmo (Danny Aiello).
More people die, though not anyone we really care about. The romantic tension between Cusack and Fonda though obvious never gets any energy. Pacino is terrific at playing characters like Pappas, serene on the surface but letting us know with a metaphorical wink darkness lurks nearby. Aiello is smooth to the end but seemed more excited during the scenes he got to sing snatches of show tunes with an old waiter than where he had to be the greasy pol.
The script originated with with Ken Lipper, a Wall Street exec who spent a few years as a New York Deputy Mayor (and in 2002 had his own financial scandal), and longtime journalist Nicholas Pileggi (who’d previously written the books that Goodfellas and Casino were based on) and then was worked over by Hollywood vets Bo Goldman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Flamingo Kid, Scent of a Woman) and Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Mosquito Coast). With all that greatness and experience, well, I expected more and frankly I don’t blame the cast except Aiello and he has a relatively small part.
A possible clue is that City Hall was directed by Harold Becker, whose career rarely rose above the above average: Paul Newman in Malice, Pacino and Ellen Barkin in Sea of Love, and the then very young Tim Hutton, Sean Penn and Tom Cruise in Taps. IMDB says this has a run time of 111 minutes but 50 years ago the studio would have cut at least 15 minutes of flab.
recommended
