You can chart some changes in Wiseman films over the years by how institutions handle their phone calls. I’m not talking just about people on the phone, of which there are many noticeable monologs, but when a person calls in to the institution, what we see of what happens. Back in the days of Juvenile Court, it was one woman routing calls to the various departments, which gave some clue to the many kinds of problems that they dealt with. The Store, as we might expect, did similar call routing. It got more serious with Domestic Violence, where victimized women were given instruction in how to break free and come to them for refuge and help. All of those were revealing of their respective institutions, but phone call responses have taken a leap forward in the last few films, both in terms of the technology involved and the sense of institutional complexity that Wiseman has been able to derive from these scenes. In Jackson Heights gave us a good example, where now it’s a few staffers simultaneously answering calls on behalf of New York City Council Member Daniel Dromm, mostly fielding complaints. Wiseman cuts between two calls that are both about a recently opened homeless shelter and goes on a fair amount of time. Ex Libris had its research calls about unicorns. And now in City Hall right at the start it looks like a major call center handling a variety of problems, from road closures, a stray dog, a traffic signal out, a one-alarm fire, a tree issue, some question that needs researching, a whole block suffering a power outage, to some food tax question. We see an elaborate computer screen display with a map and list breaking down all cases by neighborhood, and another screen is labelled “call analytics” which tells us that 17 agents are logged on and 1,153 calls have been received. Institutions and government agencies have taken on a lot more, and Wiseman has been up to the challenge. The more complex the screen array and the more problems being dealt with, the better he seems to like it. Tellingly, this film’s final credits come with sound again, a feature we’ve noted a number of times, and here of course it’s the sound of more phone calls - more drama and more government response - about six or eight calls in expertly edited succession. Improbably, there’s a hawk that isn’t able to fly away, an inquiry about whether furniture can be tossed in with the regular trash (which the film has already shown is possible), a caller politely asked “Sir, please don’t yell”, and then, inevitably, someone trying to locate a gravestone - “They have a name, they’re just trying to locate the burial ground.” Another Wiseman film winds up in a cemetery, having embraced broad swaths of life. (We even heard of a birth which led to the first-time father receiving a couple of parking tickets.)
It’s tempting, if we’re up to the truly amazing number of forty-three films or so, depending how we count some of them, to look at City Hall as a valedictory summing up of all that has come before. I hope it isn’t, and that after a pandemic delay, there’s more to come. But as Wiseman’s second-longest ever (you know the first), and given its ambitions to show us as much of Boston as a film about city government might allow, we can’t help but feel that Wiseman is going to present refined versions of continuing interests. It is a major pleasure of this film that it feels so thoroughly Wisemanesque, that the previous forty-two have prepared us well for the pleasures and education this one provides. Maybe not a summing up, but a film that shows its strengths from first frame to last.
The major player in City Hall is the Mayor Martin J. Walsh, and even though he’s around for maybe at most forty-five minutes total of the film’s four and a half hours, it still feels unusual to see a single person so much in a Wiseman film. He’s not, though, your customary main character being doggedly followed around in an old-school cinema verite fashion. Instead, he just keeps popping up all over the place, almost comically so, and often when you don’t even expect him, so this becomes a commentary on his indefatigable efforts to be present and involved and encouraging. When he’s there posing with a group behind a large check photo op for the Boston Holocaust Museum, having already turned up as a waiter at a Goodwill Thanksgiving meal, this started to feel like Where’s Waldo, the mayor was going to always be there, we just had to see how we might spot him this time. It isn’t quite that extreme, and he’s front and center on many occasions, but I don’t think it’s a film about him. He’s just hard to avoid, given his considerable efforts to make an impact wherever he can.
Unlike the absence of Trump mentions in the film before this one, even though we were deep in Trump country, this is clearly an anti-Trump movie through and through, especially for its concerns about immigrants and for showing activist government trying to do good for its citizens. Every meeting sympathetic to immigrant concerns sounds like a direct response, sometimes explicitly so, as in a press conference when Walsh tells how he did a press conference with all the immigrants “who work in the building” a half hour after Trump announced his Muslim Ban. Another pretty direct scene is a meeting with the Mayor speaking again, right after the off-year 2018 election, about the congressmen elected from their area and how useful they’ll be, as they “haven’t been able to lobby directly with the current President”, unlike how it had been with Obama. In a meeting with developers partly about disaster relief planning, he’s at it again: “We know we don’t have a national government, at least a leader down in Washington, a President in Washington that doesn’t understand the importance of resiliency.” And the Mayor’s people can voice the same frustration too, as when at a meeting (one of the rare ones without the Mayor) about the Fair Housing Act, the speaker laments how the Trump Administration is “changing rules so that it will be impossible to bring a complaint of discrimination”, because somehow intent now has to be shown. “We are watching the erosion of civil rights in this country” an effective End of Scene Line in a film that uses that device regularly.
The tricky balancing act that City Hall pulls off so well is combining the drill-down of city government activities with Wiseman’s evident desire to make this also a “neighborhood” film, as many of the wanderings seem to use government involvement as a pretext just to have a look at more interesting goings-on. It’s his determined quirkiness that somehow makes an earnest film still full of fun and unpredictable tangents. But they are never really tangents if they’re in service of a broader picture, because that’s really the main aim - what’s Boston like and what are some of the things its citizens are interested in. Watching city officials at work is a great way to get around town, just as looking at libraries served a similar purpose for New York and Ex Libris - both films want to capture some of the differences between the multiple neighborhoods which make up their cities. And if we see some intriguing wall murals or an ice skating rink along the way, then so much the better. They’re a part of the city too.
And it’s long past time for me to say more about the artistry of John Davey, who, if we’re counting, has now been the cinematographer for thirty-one Wiseman films, every one since Manoeuvre in 1979. so many that IMDB does a really half-assed job of listing his credits. I’m also long since tired of reading reviews which say “Frederick Wiseman and his cinematographer John Davey”, and then never saying anything further, although I’ve been quite guilty too of only mentioning him on occasion. I think a part of his short shrift may also be due to his being a cinematographer of observational cinema, which might suggest he doesn’t do the things that cinematographers usually do, particularly lighting. I’d say that makes his talent even more distinctive, and as always with cinematographers, he’s also been so importantly in tune with the style of his director, and is clearly a major part of that style. There have been dozens of times in these thirty-one where I’ve been certain that the camera must be on a tripod, because the image is so solid and also because I’m so accustomed to what hand-held filming can look like, necessarily jittery and ill-lit on occasion. But if you glance at the corner of a shot, you can see the slightest bit of movement, and we know this is a camera that’s being held really, really still, so that we’re not noticing camera movement when we shouldn’t. This in itself is absolutely no small feat, and it’s important that so much of Wiseman’s films just look like films, not like home movies or how cinema verite had to look fifty years ago when the cameras were heavy and hard to maneuver, or how portable digital cameras often look in the hands of the less talented, all jumpy and untethered. What’s notable too about Davey’s style is that it’s not fussy and indecisive, the camera can move when needed, but he isn’t wandering around trying to find the angle of the moment only to change his mind right after or zooming in just to have something to do. We might come to take this style for granted but we shouldn’t, because it’s quite rare. We can see why Wiseman has stuck with him all this time. Also, we do get beautiful compositions more often than we might think, particularly shots of nature, and in those montages that have become more frequent in later films, images of flowers or produce, pictures on walls, all the shots of buildings and exteriors, the staircases and empty halls. And he’s been a cinematographer of a great many performances, so much involved as to feel part of those performances, moving with dancers and actors ever so fluidly, or from them to their teachers or directors and then back again. And while we take Wiseman’s world travelling almost for granted, long stretches all over the place, obviously Davey has been there too. So he deserves far more than the occasional tip of the hat. This guy has played a major role in this great body of films.
Since we’re talking style, we could notice again how even in a lengthy film, we’ll still get montage sequences that themselves can serve as a kind of visual punctuation between lengthier episodes or feel like thoughtfully compressed segments having their say in a cinematic fashion. Otherwise mundane activities like parking tickets under windshield wipers and a meter maid dispensing them become artful wordless sequences of rapid cutting. Shots of restaurant and shop storefronts have also been a mainstay in these later films, a shorthand for the diversity of human endeavor behind those windows. And an old cemetery, as we get in this film, isn’t just a long shot of a bunch of graves - it’s a series of individual shots of headstones, many so worn as to be illegible, but still shown individually one after another. When there are paintings, photographs, or statues on view, it’s never Ken Burns-style slow pans and leisurely pace; instead it’s let’s get a quick impression of a series of a bunch of them all together. And I’ll still strongly maintain that since National Gallery, Wiseman has become something of a portrait artist, in these last few films taking a far greater interest in including lots of close-ups of faces, especially in audiences. Watch the Chinese parade or the Thanksgiving meal for considerable attention to these individual portraits - Wiseman building up his own national gallery we might say. It’s among the ways that I think we can simply say his visual style has evolved. These later films are just more visually adroit, and not just because they’ve been in color for a while.
And I haven’t yet emphasized as I had promised how self-referential his films have been, particularly this, how what were large topics in earlier films are just briefly acknowledged here. When we get a couple of quick police role calls, it’s like saying, Law and Order already did that. When we drop in to a meeting of the Mayor’s Commision for People with Disabilities and hear about their plans to fix up the old library with a permanent ramp and also that a master plan is being developed for Boston Common so that the disabled won’t have to do a long detour of several blocks, we’ve already seen the Wiseman films where these challenges have been extensively explored. So I don’t just mean that major concerns like immigration (clearly important already as we saw from In Jackson Heights) continue to be of concern, but more that the whole body of work feels linked, that the films refer back to each other with a sense of awareness of what’s come before. More examples of this are clearly needed. We know of course that the films are meeting-heavy, but I’d say a signature meeting is the one where the budget is discussed. I don’t need to list them all, but whether it’s London, Paris, or all over America (like Berkeley or Boise), there’s going to be a meeting where money issues are kicked around. When enough of these pile up, we can see Wiseman saying this is something he saw as a common element, and a new one, like in City Hall, makes us both recognize variations and see linkages. The budget meeting here is the killer budget meeting, the budget meeting to end all budget meetings, a nearly five-minute talk by presumably the city’s budget director, that begins with a full screen PowerPoint slide titled, guess what, “WHAT IS THE BUDGET?” at the top. We get a pie chart of the city revenue, hear that next year’s budget is 3.3. billion, and shades of Berkeley, that state aid has gone down considerably. Another pie chart provides the “five buckets” where money goes, and also that there’s a capital plan to do what becomes a theme of the film: “Investing in Every Neighborhood”. Like I said, City Hall is giving us scenes that seem aware we’ll be thinking back to other movies.
I’m going to pile on some more examples of City Hall taking up elements we’ve encountered in earlier films, so that hopefully I can win you over on this one. We’ve talked Holocaust references before, so a look at the Boston Holocaust Memorial should come as no surprise, where in addition to a brief appearance by the mayor there’s a quick but carefully constructed look at the structure, including close-ups of the names of some of the camps inscribed around it. Museums and history are both natural subjects for Boston and especially in At Berkeley, National Gallery, and Ex Libris we’ve seen Wiseman’s serious interest, so when here we get a Civil War Memorial Statue, we’ll also get close-ups of the statues at each corner as well as holding long enough on the front for us to read the full inscription. And Boston certainly knows its place in early American history, so we get a series of paintings with signs in a pretty elaborate montage again - of pilgrims, the Boston Tea Party, a treaty with Native Americans, and Washington Crossing the Delaware (not exactly a Boston event). The Wiseman twist here is that the sound for this comes from some Caribbean street musicians - the sound of immigrants giving the history lesson a modern spin. And speaking of music, Wiseman continues that sly use of found songs, as almost always, in pretty full versions, usually from street musicians or portable radios. We can go right back to the start of his films to see that he’s done this often, so by now we can know to notice. A nice one is the rendition of “Red River Valley” at a diversity luncheon highlighting the food of different neighborhoods, the song played by a woman in an oriental dress playing an oriental guitar. Now that’s diversity. The best of the songs is I think during a greenhouse sequence, where a radio plays the song out at the time called “Crazy World” by the Americana group Jamestown Revival. With no other dialog to get in the way, we hear lyrics “It’s still a crazy world. I guess some things are never gonna change” - thoughts to consider regarding what we’ve seen in these fifty-some years of films.
Social problems that we’ve encountered with some specificity before also return - as in a scene where a house is treated for rodents, as we saw too in Public Housing. And the opioid problem so evident in Belfast, Maine in individual stories returns here as a meeting with an introductory sign - “Opioid Crisis in Boston” and a report about a recovery center that the city has built to attempt to deal with it. I’d call these knowing repetitions linking to earlier movies - indications that problems may get local responses (a social worker in Maine, a city project here) but are obviously larger than a single location. And let me cap off the Wisemanesque with another preoccupation - what happens with animals. It’s not a major sequence, but it’s a nice tip of the hat when we drop in on the Boston Animal Care Shelter, and we see that even here the city is distributing things to the needy, in this case rubber toys to dogs. And I’ll absolutely swear that we get a few extra dog portraits than we would have seen in the pre-National Gallery days. And we see a pretty good dog washing here too, the animals being treated better than inmates we’ve watched in institutions half a century ago. So whether this small bit makes us think back to Primate, Meat, Racetrack, or Zoo, or any of the other films, the point is, Wiseman is giving us opportunities for linkage, to see his films as one grand enterprise.
There are some stylistic linkages as well. When a series of veterans movingly tell their stories at a Veteran’s Day event (the Mayor of course there too), I think it connects to the later Wiseman tendency to appreciate the public sharing of personal feelings, equally impactful with the immigrant and transgender stories we heard during In Jackson Heights, or the personal recollections social workers got in Belfast, Maine. It also puts a heavy spin on the regular bravado of the early military films such as Basic Training and Manoeuvre, among others. (OK, also Canal Zone, Sinai Field Mission, and Missile, as well as serious references in films as varied as High School and Boxing Gym.) It’s like now we’re seeing the end of processes begun much earlier - wars are now history, in the incredible recollections of a nurse who treated what were then in World War II called shell shock victims, those who lost legs or arms or both, or the incredibly affecting story from the fellow who wanted to learn about his uncle who died in combat in 1944, which leads to the shocking Wisemanesque unraveling of his next-door neighbor giving him as a gift his own wartime keepsake, a bag of Japanese gold teeth. When we get stories like these in a Wiseman film, we seem to always get enough to sense the complexity of both the people’s personal lives and the social issues we can see in play, as well as a performance aspect too, people in a sense offering dramatic monologs in public. It’s maybe why this time, while we see the exteriors of several churches and their signs, we don’t go in for any sermons, as they’re not part of city government, but also because we have had a good number of confessional scenes in these recent films that already serve a similar function.
I want to get in another word for reversals, additional developments, and complexity, because even here, Wiseman in City Hall seems to suggest that we know they’re going to be coming, and we can see his sense of humor at the same time that serious points are being made. You have to love the wedding ceremony early in the film where a city official is reciting her lengthy set of advice by heart, and we hear her whole earnest talk before we actually get any look at the couple getting hitched, who turn out to be Becka and Molly, a gay couple. In lovely and by now expected Wiseman fashion, we get the whole ceremony, all the vows, with each taking the other to be her lawful wedded wife, and then the city person starts to say “I now pronounce you husb. . . “ before catching herself to say “married” instead. The whole scene, as always, needs to play out in order for us viewers to have a chance to appreciate and think about all that’s going on. Another great scene like this is of a city building inspector reviewing progress at a construction site near the harbor. (Housing construction is another big topic in the film.) Very thoroughly, he goes floor by floor with the builder to be sure everything is being done properly, along the way complimenting the view several times. As they move toward the end, it’s quite the complication when the inspector looks out and mentions “It’s not a bad view until that building gets built” - that the great views from here are soon to be blocked by another building right in front of them. This builder obviously didn’t know anything about this, and the look on his face is pained to say the least. Once again, we needed the whole process for this last development to have its impact.
And I think Wiseman gets the summary scene to end all summary scenes in City Hall, although it resembles at least a few others going as far back as Canal Zone - the patriotic ceremony with more unexpected complications. It feels like Wiseman as composer bringing together multiple themes in a last coda, reminding us too that this isn’t his first symphony that ended like this. We see a sign outside a hall that says BSO, presumably the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Inside the hall, we hear bagpipes and see the large audience, where the music is part of a military color guard procession. (Not our first bagpipes, by the way, but I’ll spare you the Wiseman trivia question.) We see lots of uniformed police in the audience, and just what the nature of this event is never gets mentioned, but looks probably like an event honoring police officers. When the Star-Spangled Banner begins, it’s sung at first by a female black police officer, but the surprise comes when halfway through she’s joined by a male white officer, and the intended symbolism is completely clear. This also immediately springs to mind the end of In Jackson Heights which used the Fourth to July to similar effect, making a final statement about tradition changing to recognize and include more participants. After the color guard marches off stage, look who’s here again but Mayor Walsh, and his last speech is great, discussing first at some length his own being the son of immigrants, and about the African immigrant woman who brought his hotel breakfast on the morning he was elected Mayor, who said to him “We won. We are going to be Mayor”, feeling herself closely involved in the victory. “We’ll keep leading the fight to defend immigrants,” he says, and also brings up gender equality and LGBTQ rights. In another nice Wiseman summary line he says “I’m concerned about the State of the Union. What happens in Washington, we feel on the streets of Boston.” The sense of interconnectedness and role of community, not just in Boston but in all the places we’ve seen in Wiseman films, could not be more strongly expressed. Walsh gets a full standing ovation, and I hope Wiseman feels in some way his own audience is giving him one too.