City of Hope
Written and directed by John Sayles
Starring Vincent Spano, Tony Lo Blanco, Joe Morton and Angela Bassett
At the Mandolin Cinema, Sydney
Reviewed by Barry Healy
John Sayles launches a full frontal assault on the myth of the contemporary US. Loosely based on life in Jersey City, New Jersey, really this is Anytown, USA — the corruption, alienation, violence and decay are distilled from all US metropolises. You can almost smell the decadence.
This is a town in which the old power structure of ethnic and financial alliances is crumbling and a new power base of the most underprivileged is being forged. Sayles reconstructs the established Hollywood style of personalising these issues to produce an ensemble piece of remarkable strength and originality.
Sayles is a radical film maker with many fine independent productions to his credit like Matewan, The Brother From Another Planet and Lianna. He believes that "politics, once you get below the national level, are as much about family, personal connections and culture as they are about ideology". So he has constructed a sprawling epic that reveals the interconnections that tie the fate of workers and the underprivileged to the caprices of financiers and racketeers.
The camera almost becomes a character as it snoops into the private conversations of crooked ward-heeler politicians cooking deals in City Hall and then slices off to follow another character's attempt to preserve some dignity within the system. Sayles reveals himself as a master of screen writing as he brings together what appear at first to be at least five different private tales.
At the centre of the struggle is Nick (Vincent Spano), trying to escape the boredom of his aimless existence and family conflicts through drugs and petty crime. When a heist goes wrong, it unleashes a conflict which draws in the levels of the city power structure, with tragic results.
At all levels of this structure, the players pay. At the bottom they pay with their power and their lives. Further up they pay with their dignity. Any who think they have won a piece of the action lose the chance to have truly intimate human relationships.
As Nick tries to free himself from his inherited connections and responsibilities, we watch as a liberal black council representative tries to maintain his personal values in the swirl of pressures within his community. It is possibly in its representation of issues within the black community, where Sayles displays his preference for liberalism, that the film is weakest.
What prevents this from becoming some sort of socialist realist morality-play-by-numbers are the extraordinary quality of the acting, even for the bit parts, and some of the most telling dialogue ever spoken in a US film. Too many films include swearing to try to cover the thinness of the dialogue, but not this one. These lines cut and deliver with conviction. As with all true morality tales, the truth is spoken by an idiot, in this case the mad homeless person called Astroid. Aping a TV commercial, he asks the bemused and numbed population: "Why settle for less when you can have it all?" At the end of this film, the viewer is left wondering how much longer the oppressed in the USA will go on settling for less.