City Hall

The venerable ninety-year-old documentarian Frederick Wiseman made his name with cinéma vérité movies about institutions such as Titicut Follies (1967), High School (1968), and Hospital (1970). These tight, concentrated, under 90-minute glimpses of a specific subject ended up conveying a great deal about the larger place and the era in which the films were made. And while his pictures have gotten much longer, his style and approach in films like Boxing Gym (2010), National Gallery (2014), and Ex Libris – The New York Public Library (2017) has not changed. His docs reflect his personal experience of the time (typically four to eight weeks) that he spends observing his subject without any particular agenda or thesis. The conclusions we draw from watching one of his films often have as much to do with what we bring to the experience as what he shows us. Wiseman’s films about cities and towns—Aspen (1991), Belfast, Maine (1999), Monrovia, Indiana (2018)—are less successful than his films about institutions because the subjects are so sprawling we inevitably feel the inherent limitations in what his camera shows us; and we can’t help wondering what’s happening in the areas that we’re not seeing depicted on screen.

Wiseman bridges both of his principal preoccupations in his 43rd feature, City Hall—a film that is more about the city of Boston than it is about the goings-on in a typical American city hall. The film shows many of the day-to-day interactions between the public and the city government (folks trying to get out of parking tickets, a civil wedding, community meetings and presentations)—but it also ventures out of City Hall and into the homes, organization headquarters, and gathering places of many diverse neighborhoods in the Boston area. So City Hall ultimately plays less like one of Wiseman’s films about an institution and more like one of his “place” pictures; only this film succeeds far better than any of his previous films of this sort, with the possible exception of his excellent In Jackson Heights (2015)

I do wish Wiseman still occasionally demonstrated the discipline of his earlier work. What would a more focused movie that only took place within the exposed brick and concrete walls of Boston’s imposing New Brutalist style City Hall have looked like? Many of this movie’s strongest sequences venture outside the building, to explore the myriad problems faced by municipal government. One of the strongest scenes, occurring near the end of the picture, shows a meeting of Chinese businessmen who want to open a marijuana dispensary in a predominantly Cape Verdean neighborhood. But I found just as much insight and drama in the shorter glimpses of business conducted at City Hall. And early scene where a justice of the peace is marrying two women plays as both hilarious—the officiant is comically “Boston”—and deeply moving if you know the leading role this city played in the history of marriage equality in America.

Mayor Marty Walsh emerges as the star of the picture. The Irish-Catholic Dorchester-born Democrat comes across both as a decent, competent leader and as folksy local politician who talks a lot without really saying much. City Hall spends a great deal of time with people who talk a great deal in meetings, and Wiseman’s long-take style of editing provides a fascinating examination of how good public speakers make their points and also how going on for too long can undermine those good points. This is certainly not a film about sound bites, which is refreshing. Walsh sounds surprisingly like his predecessor, the beloved long-serving Boston mayor Tom Menino. Walsh lacks Menino’s signature predilection to malaprops but Marty has his own distinctive cadence and odd sentence structure. On two occasions he uses Purdue Pharma as an example of a company that has provided solutions to problems it had a hand in creating by stating something to the effect of, “I’m not gonna give ‘em credit but they have stepped up and done something.” I believe that’s the definition of giving them credit Mr. Mayor. But the ability to speak coherently is not ultimately what defines a good city mayor. The ability to connect with constituents and craft effective policy is what wins the day. City Hall doesn’t spend much time on the specifics of policy, but it does illustrate how all parties, stakeholders, and beneficiaries can come together to craft policies that work for the largest number of citizens.