Review: City Hall Tasks Us with Reflecting on a Nation’s Systems of Power

Its provocations can seem savage at a glance, but they emerge from an observational tranquility that is uniquely Frederick Wiseman’s own.

City Hall
Photo: Zipporah Films

Frederick Wiseman never steps in the same river twice, though the methods of this prolific, preeminent documentarian (approaching age 91, with nearly 50 features under his belt) are, with rare exception, unchanging. So it is with City Hall, Wiseman’s formidable and incisive exploration of local government in Boston, Massachusetts.

Non-diegetic score and identifying on-screen titles are eschewed throughout, while the film’s duration is well past the feature-length norm—in this case, four-and-a-half engrossing hours. The camerawork, courtesy of Wiseman’s longtime collaborator John Davey, is mostly fly-on-the-wall, swish-panning between or settling for extended periods on a given scene’s subjects. Mundanities that many other artists would turn away from are manna to Wiseman. He gets as much poetic and provocative mileage out of a budget meeting that projects the fiscal year to come as he does a glass skyscraper reflecting a magic-hour sunset (one of many Ozu-esque pillow shots that act as contemplative connective tissue between sequences).

The closest City Hall has to a protagonist is Boston’s Democratic mayor, Marty Walsh, though this is mainly due to his seemingly superhuman ability to show up at almost any event where cameras (and not just Wiseman’s) are present. It might be a Veteran’s Day celebration at which Walsh re-tells his own tale of alcoholic recovery, likening it to battlefield combat. Or it could be a food bank event at which he finds a germane moment, in-between packing up frozen turkeys, to lambast the N.R.A. for their PR evasions in the wake of another mass shooting.

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Walsh is clearly attempting to be on the right side of history, particularly when addressing his administration’s efforts to diversify staff and expand services to minority communities. It would be easy to prop him up as a progressive-minded hero, but Wiseman isn’t the glorifying type. He’s more interested in how people wrestle with their lots in life, how they navigate entrenched socioeconomic structures that can be as much a trap as a means of liberation.

A key early scene in City Hall showcases a safety inspector surveying the interior of a half-built condominium. He’s very by-the-book and evidently good at his job. This will be a solidly built edifice, no doubt. But we see enough of the surrounding neighborhood so that the shadow of gentrification is never far from the mind. Does the excellence of the product matter if the system that spawned it is, at heart, so implicitly callous and corrupt? The scene concludes with a nice bit of black-comic punctuation as the inspector and a construction worker joke that the building’s waterfront view will soon be obstructed by another condo one block over.

The wheels of progress turn, forward and back, sometimes screeching to a halt before starting up again. And every Wiseman film, in addition to documenting the events and actions in front of the camera, captures the tenor of the times in which it’s made. It’s no accident that Wiseman is focusing on local government at a time of intense federal crisis in the United States. Reading between the lines, City Hall is an affirmation of the down-ballot bodies that test-run policies that may eventually be implemented at the highest levels of power. But it’s also healthily skeptical toward these same politicos and their processes.

The charming Marty Walsh’s apparent ubiquity is part of the film’s overall objective. Wiseman lulls us into thinking this forward-thinking politician can be everywhere at once. But as City Hall enters hour three, Walsh fades from view for a while, and we more clearly see the hierarchies that keep Boston’s city hall at an insulated distance from its most troubled districts. This is especially evident in the film’s centerpiece, a community town hall (at least a half-hour in on-screen length) in which residents of the poor neighborhood of Dorchester clash with the owners behind a proposed cannabis dispensary.

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Wiseman has always had an affinity for meetings, specifically those in which some sort of policy is discussed at great length, in the minutest detail. This is one of his most harrowing sequences, as the multi-racial attendees pepper the store’s Asian proprietors with questions that range from foot traffic to ethnic representation, while a representative of Walsh’s cabinet makes promises to residents that will, in all likelihood, not be kept. Walsh returns after this sequence concludes, first in a meeting with an NAACP rep within the concrete confines of city hall (the mayor suddenly seems like a gang leader on home turf). And then while presiding over a tongue bath of a big-donor event that, at one point, features two police officers, a white male and a black female, duetting on the National Anthem.

Such provocations can seem savage at a glance, but they emerge from an observational tranquility that is uniquely Wiseman’s own, and which leave room for individual interpretation. What each of us sees is what each of us gets. But how do we arrive at our respective ideological terminus? City Hall isn’t an incitement, so much as an invitation to serenely reflect on and think through systems of power that are, like the people who labor within them, constantly evolving—for better and for worse.

Score: 
 Director: Frederick Wiseman  Distributor: Zipporah Films  Running Time: 272 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2020

Keith Uhlich

Keith Uhlich's writing has been published in The Hollywood Reporter, BBC, and Reverse Shot, among other publications. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle.

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