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Giuliani Time

2006, Movie, NR, 130 mins

Giuliani Time: Review

GIULIANI TIME
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Veteran documentary cinematographer Kevin Keating's directing debut is a scathing chronicle of Rudy Giuliani's two-term tenure as the 107th mayor of New York City and his post-9/11 reinvention as "America's mayor." Originally conceived as a one-hour indictment of Giuliani's record on First Amendment issues, Keating's five-years-in-the-making film begins with Village Voice editor Wayne Barrett's guided tour through the dark side of Giuliani's carefully spun family history: He was born in 1944 in a working-class Brooklyn neighborhood nicknamed "Pig Town"; his father, Harold, did time in Sing Sing, and his Uncle Leo and cousin Lewis D'Avanzo both had repeated run-ins with the law. As a young man, Giuliani traded in his youthful Kennedy-liberal sympathies for more conservative views, and as a prosecutor he established a reputation for being tough on narcotics offenders, illegal immigrants, organized-crime figures and white-collar criminals. He was named associate attorney general for the Justice Department in 1981 and made his first foray into politics in the 1989 mayoral race, when he was defeated by David Dinkins. Elected four years later on a tough-on-crime platform, Giuliani's war on quality-of-life crimes — unlicensed peddling, panhandling, turnstile-jumping, aggressive squeegee-wielding — was the cornerstone of a plan to reclaim New York from lawlessness, but Keating marshals an impressive array of talking heads to put Giuliani's theories and achievements into a larger cultural context. Some of the sharpest criticism comes from two of his erstwhile cronies: Former Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew and former NYPD Commissioner William Bratton. Keating juxtaposes lofty law-and-order rhetoric with the mean-spirited reality of cops arresting artists for selling their own paintings on the street and Giuliani mocking Parkinson's disease sufferer John Hynes for daring to call in to the mayor's weekly radio show and take him to task for cutting Medicare and food-stamp assistance to the disabled. Keating captures the hypocrisy of Giuliani's moral stances, along with the pervasive atmosphere of intolerance and disdain for New York's poor, un- and underemployed, and nonwhite citizens, which characterized his administration and culminated in the brutalization of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima by members of Brooklyn's 70th Precinct. Keating, who learned his craft shooting for respected documentarians like Barbara Kopple and the Maysles brothers, takes his stand early, makes his points bluntly and backs them up solidly with archival footage and expert testimony. The result is fearlessly divisive and will no doubt play according to viewers' preexisting perceptions of urban pathologies, urban policing, distribution of wealth, race relations, crime, and the many, many other issues on which it touches. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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