City of Hope

This one’s for John Sayles fans. Its formidable ensemble cast includes a long list of the acting talent in Sayles’ stock company, and each gets just enough screen time to make a memorable impression. Enough said!

We wondered where John Sayles’ sprawling, ambitious City of Hope has been for the last 30 years. All we remember being available was a mangy pan-scanned laserdisc. The show is packed with speaking parts, with some actors on-screen for just a couple of scenes: with so many faces cropped away the story became unintelligible.

Let’s say up front that we’re always impressed by John Sayles’ films. We were eager to catch up with City of Hope based on the excellence of the writer-director’s  Return of the Secaucus Seven,  Lianna,  Matewan,  Eight Men Out,  Passion Fish,  The Secret of Roan Inish,  Lone Star,  Men With Guns and  Casa de los babys. City of Hope doesn’t disappoint.

Unless we count his numerous music videos for Bruce Springsteen, John Sayles never repeated himself with a film project. In his commentary, the director says that Springsteen songs like Streets of Philadelphia provided an inspiration for his urban-set movies. The setting here is Hudson City New Jersey, a fictitious burg torn by racial tension and economic disparity. The story is not a film noir, although it does remind us somewhat of the 1952  The Turning Point, in which a mobster burns down a building to destroy evidence. It’s more like a Robert Altman multi-character story … only more coherent. Sayles charts the paths of at least 20 characters, all of whom are in some way involved with the everyday corruption of Hudson City. Instead of zeroing in on one criminal or victim, Sayles’ character sketches add up to a credible snapshot of an entire town in trouble.

John Sayles avoids the narrative pitfall of the Tabloid Format, that hypes each story element to the point that nothing is credible. A core example is Arthur Penn and Lillian Hellman’s grand liberal epic  The Chase (1966), in which a Texas town goes lawless-wild. As much as we like the all-star performances, the movie is so overcooked as to become laughable. Sayles doesn’t resort to forced irony, worst-case coincidences or exaggerated violence. It’s entirely believable, especially the scenes of black/white racial tension.

Sayles’ outwardly complicated tale of civic malaise and criminality is also easy to follow. Every job, company, store, and money-making enterprise in Hudson City is in some way connected to the corruption in City Hall. Nobody is more compromised than building contractor Joe Rinaldi (Tony Lo Bianco of  The French Connection), who owns a large building that Mayor Baci (Louis Zorich) wants demolished to benefit a lucrative redevelopment project. Joe’s has been unable to evict his low-rent tenants (and squatters), and the fixers at City Hall now want him to hire an arsonist. When Joe balks, his construction permits hit snags and his union crews walk out. Seeking help from the local mob chieftain Kerrigan (Lawrence Tierney), Joe instead gets a lecture: he had better play along, as City Hall’s redevelopment scheme has Kerrigan’s full approval.

A key character is Joe’s rebellious son Nick (Vincent Spano of  Baby It’s You), who Joe is ‘supporting’ with a featherbed construction job. In debt to gamblers and nursing a bad drug habit, Nick quits the no-work job and joins his lowlife pal Zip (Todd Graff) to rob the appliance store of ‘Mad Anthony’ (Josh Mostel). The ambitious detective O’Brien (Kevin Tigh) easily cons local crook Carl (John Sayles) into admitting that Nick was in on the robbery — giving Mayor Baci more leverage to force Joe Rinaldi to burn the building. Now a fugitive, Nick initiates a flirtation with divorced waitress Angela (Barbara Williams). Her ex-husband Rizzo (Anthony John Denison) is a dangerously violent patrol cop, and very jealous. When he sees what’s going on, Rizzo would like nothing better than to beat Nick to death.

That’s only half of the story.

The only opposition to Mayor Baci’s corrupt regime is the principled and conscientious city councilman and activist Wynn (Joe Morton). With Baci controlling the voting at City Council meetings, Wynn’s pro- working class initiatives get nowhere. Black constituents like local businessman Levonne (Frankie Faison) deride Wynn as a sell-out. Worse, Wynn soon finds himself on the wrong end of an explosive crime story. Patrolman Rizzo and his partner harass two young black boys, who express their anger by beating up a college professor out jogging (Bill Raymond). Soon caught, the boys cover for their crime by claiming that the teacher made homosexual advances. Wynn intuits that the boys are lying, but his community expects him to prove his worth by going after the teacher.

This sketch leaves out over half of the film’s characters, many of whom have only once scene yet make solid contributions. Nick Rinaldi has a sister, Laurie (Gina Gershon of  Showgirls) and a mother, Pina (Rose Gregorio of  True Confessions); their cook Mrs. Ramirez (Miriam Colon) lives in the building that the crooks want to torch. Wynn has a supportive wife in Reesha (Angela Bassett). The fierce mother of one of the delinquent boys is Jeanette (Gloria Foster of  The Angel Levine). John Sayles tops it all with ‘Asteroid,’ a wild-card character played against type by one of Sayles’ first actor-collaborators, David Strathairn. The homeless deranged public nuisance hovers noisily around the periphery. A one-man Brechtian chorus, Asteroid repeats what he hears, pointedly echoing the cries for help of the people caught in Joe Rinaldi’s burning building.

John Sayles refuses to simplify the situation: no ‘heroic’ individual can magically untangle the mess that is Hudson City. The fix is in for a cheap swindle that will shift public money into private hands and put poor people out of their living spaces. The mobster Kerrigan is correct — ‘the way things are’ makes a puppet of the supposedly successful and independent Joe Rinaldi. The story emphasis on Nick Rinaldi never fully takes the foreground. Nick’s personal grievances are woven into the lives of other characters. His father Joe has been so indulgent because of a past family tragedy with an older brother, that links them to the criminal Carl and the war in Vietnam. Nick’s attempt to forge an honest relationship with Angela, who has a physically-impaired toddler, only invites a violent reaction from the manic cop Rizzo.

“You’re not elected to test your moral fiber. You’re elected to represent people.”

The real hope comes with Joe Morton’s Councilman Wynn, whose ‘honest’ approach repeatedly fails to get people to Do The Right Thing. Wynn seeks help from a retired ex-mayor, a black man now more interested in his golf game. The debatable advice is for Wynn to start playing Baci’s crooked game with the game’s crooked rules. The black voting bloc doesn’t want a Nice Guy, but an advocate to express their anger. Wynn adroitly redirects that rage in the direction of Mayor Baci and City Hall. John Sayles’ conclusion leaves the big questions unanswered, but doesn’t shut out a reason to Hope for the best. He gives the righteous Wynn a second chance, and brings father and son Rinaldi together.

Filming in Cincinatti, Sayles worked for the second time with cinematographer Robert Richardson, who did notable work for Oliver Stone and Martin Scorsese, and then a long series of Quentin Tarantino pictures. This may be Sayles’ first anamorphic widescreen feature. The format of choice is flat Super-35, and the flexibility of the camerawork is remarkable. With improved film stock, Richardson has no difficulty getting deep focus on night streets with a minimum of added studio lighting. Sayles’ camera frequently moves with characters from one setting to another. Many shots are extended masters, without frequent cuts.

The interiors all look like real locations. The streets of Hudson City lack modern lighting. Sayles lets the darker night exterior stay pretty dark, with people half in silhouette until they step into a stronger practical light. It’s not a good movie to watch at high noon, and another reason why those old pan-scan copies just didn’t play.

Sayles’ main accomplishment is of course keeping his myriad dramatic elements in balance, communicating fine points of story and character. We never feel we’re being short-changed, even when a favorite star like Chris Cooper is present for just a couple of minutes of character support. Roger Ebert compared City of Hope to Richard Linklater’s  Slacker, a movie that continually shifted its main character. Every few minutes, Liniklater’s camera drops one character to wander off with someone new who enters the frame. Sayles’ rambling camera makes frequent shifts between his array of subplots, but for the purpose of tying loose ends together. The citizens of Hudson City don’t realize that their fates are so tightly interconnected.

Viewers may not want to connect Sayles’ narrative dots, even though he draws most of the lines for them. The film’s 20 or so key characters make strong individual impacts — one of them will disappear for 15 minutes, and be recognized when they return. A good example is the Permit Inspector (Steve Randazzo) … we see him at City Hall bragging about having no responsibilities, and then much later he’s at Joe Rinaldi’s construction site, citing him for code violations ‘that weren’t there yesterday.’

Tony Lo Bianco and Joe Morton carry some very difficult dramatic confrontations. Barbara Williams brings warmth to her scenes, flirting with Nick and demonstrating her commitment to her son. Joe Grifasi’s legal lizard Pauly makes the ‘fix’ seem very credible. Aware of his own role role in the hypocrisy, Pauly excuses himself from some conversations in the interest of Plausible Deniability.  ^*  Sayles gives us all we need of Josh Mostel’s overbearing TV salesman, but leaves us wanting more of Rose Gregorio’s unassertive Mrs. Rinaldi. The two troublemaking kids from the housing projects are as believable as the loose-cannon police patrolman. All the cops hate their boss O’Brien, but only a few abuse their authority with unnecessary violence. The only ‘lawman’ to do his job right is Franklin (Daryl Edwards) an unarmed rent-a-cop who foils a robbery, all on his own.

Sayles plays tough but he also plays fair. He does not exploit violence as thrilling commercial content. After establishing Mayor Baci as an utterly cynical manipulator, he gives the crook a ‘re-elect me’ dinner speech that’s actually inspiring. Baci is no fool — he’s the one who invents the ‘City of Hope’ motto.

Some sources say that rights problems were what kept a proper widescreen video release of City of Hope from happening. If this is indeed the first time it’s been available in its anamorphic dimensions, we’re grateful to have caught it. As long as we’re talking Missing In Action John Sayles movies, we’re still waiting for a disc release of his 1984 science fiction drama The Brother from Another Planet. In his breakthrough role, Joe Morton plays the title extra-terrestrial.