City Hall (Frederick Wiseman, 2020) (Patreon)

The great Frederick Wiseman will turn 91 on New Year's Day. Like a handful of old masters (Godard and Michael Snow come to mind), Wiseman is still going strong and shows no signs of slowing down. At the same time, City Hall is a rather unusual film for Wiseman. Very few directors have exhibited the same single-minded consistency he has, and because his style is so dialed down as to seem effortless, it can be a bit jarring even when one detects very subtle changes. Has Wiseman entered his later period?

For decades, Wiseman films have provided close examinations of various pillars of public life: hospitals, courtrooms, classrooms, factories, artistic institutions, you name it. And this project has taken him all over the United States and across the world. (Recent films like La Danse and National Gallery represented breaks from Wiseman's great novel of America, to explore European organizations.) But City Hall is shot right in Wiseman's hometown of Boston, and the film betrays a degree of familiarity with its subject matter. Typically, we can vicariously experience Wiseman's learning curve as he discovers the inner workings of some social entity during filming. That is, the documentaries themselves are also documents of Wiseman's own curiosity.

But City Hall feels unusually comprehensive, even for a Wiseman film. In looking closely at various components of Boston civic life -- the mayor's office, churches, soup kitchens, animal shelters, public housing officials, and garbage collectors -- Wiseman's tone suggests that he had been making this film in his head for dozens of years. There are not many surprises in City Hall, no fly-on-the-wall observations of a system betraying its own collapse. For the most part, Boston seems to be puttering along, even if the endless roundtable meetings that allow for this good governance are concerned with arcane minutiae. City Hall suggests that it takes thousands to run a city, but more than that, it takes time, and a certain patience with the process.

So all in all, City Hall operates within the generally approbatory register of such late Wiseman works as In Jackson Heights and Ex Libris. But, aside from one shocking instance when someone (a Section 8 housing resident) breaks protocol and addresses Wiseman's camera, there is one other element in this film that sets it radically apart from other entries in the Wiseman filmography. In the midst of seeing mostly anonymous workers and bureaucrats making Boston function, Wiseman comes as close as he's ever gotten to giving us a single protagonist. Across the 4 1/2 hour running time, Boston mayor Marty Walsh appears with almost comic regularity. If we didn't know Wiseman was organizing the material we're seeing, we might start to think Walsh was everywhere all the time, some multi-dimensional entity surveying Boston through AI-based superabundance.

Wiseman's portrait of Walsh is somewhat ambivalent. He operates like a standard-issue liberal politician, delivering the right soundbites and performing a kind of empathetic form of civic theater. His only real misstep captured in the film is when he is speaking to war veterans and somewhat thoughtlessly comparing his struggle with alcoholism to their crises in returning to civilian life. But mostly, he listens and reassures, while most of the labor we see is being done by others. City Hall doesn't suggest that this makes Walsh a bad mayor, and overall the film is a pretty good argument for Walsh's executive tenure. 

But it does give the impression that a city requires a figurehead who is mostly called upon to "make connections" and touch base with various stakeholders, and that this can be a relatively positive thing on a local level. City Hall shows us public organizational structures the probably can't scale upward to the state or federal level. So Wiseman seems to imply that all functional politics is local politics, and if you actually want to make changes you can see, well, as the saying goes, you can't fight City Hall.