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City Hall

1996, Movie, R, 111 mins

City Hall: Review

CITY HALL
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Lushly filmed on location in New York City, CITY HALL is the story of Deputy Mayor Kevin Calhoun (John Cusack) -- an ambitious, slickly competent operative who's equal parts Jim Carville and George Stephanopolous -- and Hizzoner, Mayor John Pappas (Al Pacino), surrogate father and would-be savior of a dying city. There's a thriller plot here (a police shooting unravels a city-wide skein of corruption), but it's relatively unimportant. Harold Becker's movie is about an Oedipal clash of will that is as passionate and romantically conceived as any love story; in a broader sense, it's about menschkeit -- a bastardized Yiddish term describing the homosocial network of honor, loyalty and mutual indebtedness that binds men together in public society. The film's heart is a funeral oration of truly grand proportions -- it's got to be the longest speech in recent Hollywood history -- which Pacino delivers like a man possessed, elevating an unwieldy chunk of Cuomo-esque rhetoric into the thespian stratosphere. Throughout, Pacino absolutely nails the hollow but overpowering charisma that is so easily mistaken for leadership; anyone whose heart has ever been broken by a politician will recognize it at once. leave a comment
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