Review: Emilio Estevez’s The Public Has Its Heart, If Not Its Head, in the Right Place

The film packs as many tortured subplots and pre-chewed sociological insights as can possibly fit into a two-hour runtime.

The Public
Photo: Universal Pictures Content Group

They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and no recent film better illustrates the truth of that axiom than Emilio Estevez’s comically unconvincing social-issues drama The Public. Written, directed, produced by, and starring the erstwhile Brat Pack idol, the film badly wants to do for the contemporary urban homeless what The Grapes of Wrath did for Dust Bowl Okies. (Just in case you missed the parallels, characters helpfully keep referencing the novel by “good ol’ Johnny Steinbeck.”) But despite a premise that brims with tantalizing socio-political possibilities—a group of homeless men who spend their days in the Cincinnati Public Library decide to “occupy” it during a particularly frigid winter night—the film is a clunky, overwritten attempt to pack as many tortured subplots and pre-chewed sociological insights as can possibly fit into a two-hour runtime.

Estevez’s sympathy for the urban poor seems genuine enough, and The Public evinces an admirable respect for seemingly old-fashioned civic institutions like the public library, which one character in the film actually refers to as “the last bastion of true democracy we have in this country.” But the filmmaker is unable to mold these and other patriotic beliefs and feelings into a coherent, much less compelling, work of narrative art.

The Public is shot in a shaky, handheld camera style in attempt to lend a veneer of documentary-style realism to the proceedings, but it only serves to highlight how phony and condescending Estevez’s depiction of homelessness really is. The homeless characters in the film, which include one man (Che “Rhymefest” Smith) who believes the government implanted deadly laser vision in his eyes when he was a baby and another (Patrick Hume) with a savant-like knowledge of trivia, come off as caricatures. And while Jackson (Michael K. Williams), the homeless organizer of the peaceful library protest, is a somewhat more rounded figure, his story is sidelined by that of the film’s white, non-homeless protagonist.

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That character, played with aw-shucks affectation by Estevez and saddled with name Stuart Goodson—all the better to indicate his fundamentally kind-hearted nature—is a library supervisor who, in over-plotted and unconvincing fashion, joins the protest and becomes the primary point of contact between the homeless occupiers and the city’s crisis negotiator (Alec Baldwin in a surprisingly unmannered performance). Estevez has a way of placing his own character at the center of the film’s drama, a tendency that reaches its eyeroll-inducing nadir in a live TV interview during which Stuart soporifically recites a long passage from The Grapes of Wrath as the rest of the characters watch on in rapt fascination.

In moments like this, The Public’s clumsy but at least well-meaning sense of civic responsibility curdles into outright vanity. Estevez not only wants to recapture the spirit of Steinbeck, but to also play Tom Joad. He’s not up to either task, though, and he’s unable to tell us anything we don’t already know about the plight of the homeless, the decline of public institutions, or any of the other social problems the film attempts to tackle.

Score: 
 Cast: Alec Baldwin, Emilio Estevez, Jena Malone, Taylor Schilling, Christian Slater, Che “Rhymefest” Smith, Gabrielle Union, Jacob Vargas, Michael K. Williams, Jeffrey Wright  Director: Emilio Estevez  Screenwriter: Emilio Estevez  Distributor: Photo: Universal Pictures Content Group  Running Time: 122 min  Rating: PG-13  Year: 2018  Buy: Video

Keith Watson

Keith Watson is the proprietor of the Arkadin Cinema and Bar in St. Louis, Missouri.

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