“2020 seemed to be a year even more than usually crowded with high-profile documentaries (Collective! Time! Boys State! Dick Johnson Is Dead!), each one practically sweating with desperation to be seen as more innovative and relevant than the last. Leave it to the nonagenarian Frederick Wiseman to deliver—handily and modestly, with no fanfare—a film that makes the lot of them feel like mere pretenders. In its scope City Hall is both modest (it regards, with Wiseman’s characteristic air of clinical detachment, nothing more or less than the daily operations by which the city of Boston runs itself) and vast (it clocks in at four-and-a-half hours). It is the work of a master filmmaker who has perfected a rigorous documentary technique he first pioneered more than fifty years ago, in 1967’s Titicut Follies.
“Nothing very remarkable seems to happen in City Hall. We spend a lot of time following Mayor Marty Walsh and his administrative team as they hold meetings, talk with local stakeholders, and strategize about policy. But, as in all of Wiseman’s films, the banal and the mundane are peppered with carefully observed touches of humor, humanity, quirk: a Thanksgiving dinner for the city’s homeless population (Walsh himself pours the gravy), a meeting of community members with the small business owners hoping to open a cannabis shop in their neighborhood, a Veteran’s Day gathering that becomes an opportunity to swap war stories. A veterinarian examines a canine patient, a road crew works on cleaning the street, and in the office of the Parking Clerk violators appeal their fines. (One explains that he was running late for a date; another was on his way to the hospital after his wife had gone into labor. Both tickets are dismissed.)
“There are a million stories in City Hall, stories of people getting married, struggling to recover from drug addiction, dealing with rodent infestations. And for every one of these stories there is a second story, that of a person doing a job: a justice of the peace, an exterminator, a traffic controller, a police officer, a tree surgeon. By the end of the film, in which we hear a performance of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at Symphony Hall, we may be surprised to find that tears have come to our eyes—surprised, perhaps, because ‘tear-jerking’ is the last word that would ever be used to describe a filmmaker as unsentimental as Wiseman. City Hall doesn’t stoop to cheap sentiment to affect us, nor should it be taken as a piece of superficial America-First patriotism. (A native of Boston, Wiseman now resides in Paris.) Rather, it is profound and moving in its insistence that American democracy is only as strong as the untold numbers of individual people who labor to make their community a better place to live.
“Such a notion feels especially resonant at the end of a year in which democracy, community, and social services were tested to the point of breaking. But this is a film that would have been just as powerful no matter when it was released. The ideas that Wiseman explores in City Hall aren’t ‘timely.’ They’re timeless.”
Ian Scott Todd, PhD. is a graduate of Tufts University. He currently lives in Boston, where he teaches courses in film studies, literature, and writing. His blog can be found at www.primalscenes.blogspot.com.
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