Title: Hoffa.
Date: 1/18/1993; Publication: The New Republic; Author:
Kauffmann, Stanley
Cynics, repent. Hoffa (20th Century-Fox) is good. All the advance knowingness,
the surety that a
What can we reasonably expect of a biographical film about a complex person? What point is there in such a film? Obviously it can't include all of the person's relevant actions or ideas: that's what books are for. A film ought to convince us that the very act of dramatization enlightens us about the person as character, as alembic of ideas. We want to feel that the cinematic experience of the life is enlarging, not exploitative. To a considerable extent, this was true of Malcolm X; to at least the same extent, it's true of Hoffa.
Mamet, more than skillful, understands all this.
His subject is not labor history itself but Hoffa's character and the actions
it produced. To underscore what Stanislavsky would
have called a through-line for that character, Mamet
begins at the end, or near it: in Jimmy Hoffa's car on July 30, 1975, as he
waits at a roadhouse near
Waiting with him is a longtime friend, Bobby Ciaro, played by DeVito. Mamet has apparently created Bobby out of several people who were close to Hoffa for years--to serve as confidant and counterweight. He is Italian and honest, at least as honest as Hoffa, in a film in which most of the Italians are mobsters. (Also, his tolerance of Hoffa's racial slurs about Italians is intended to show that Hoffa doesn't really mean them.)
We meet Hoffa when Ciaro does. On a wintry night on a country road in the early 1930s, the young Hoffa wakes up Ciaro, a truck driver who had pulled over for a snooze. Hoffa wants to recruit him for the then relatively small Teamsters Union. (This encounter was typical for Hoffa; see Arthur A. Sloane's fascinating biography.) Afraid of losing his job, Bobby resists, obscenely. Jimmy persists, obscenely, pointing out that Bobby had to pull over for a snooze because he is overworked; and Jimmy recognizes the burn scars between Bobby's fingers as further proof. Truckers light up to keep themselves awake so they can go on driving and make a living. Then they fall asleep with cigarettes between their fingers. At last Jimmy persuades Bobby. It is only Hoffa's first persuasion in the film.
Mamet then takes us engrossingly through the arc of Hoffa's career as union organizer and union officer, via a distillation of confrontations, meetings, illegalities, government investigations. In its 150 minutes, the film gives us what we want of Hoffa's life to justify its dramatization (as noted above), but it lavishes much more than data on us. It exudes the fervor, the sheer pleasure, that Hoffa gets out of his career: the exultation in the scraps--some of them literal--the enjoyment of success and admiration. We're also convinced that, though he loved scrapping, he wouldn't have plunged into these particular scraps if he hadn't wanted to improve the lot of working men.
When he begins, the Teamsters have fewer than 100,000 members; when he
finishes, they are nearing 2 million, almost all of whom adore him. And, Sloane
tells us, not only the Teamsters--some of the employers as well. One employer
said: "I disagree with him on some things, but I admire him tremendously
and like him very much .... He's actually a genius."A
"Sin" brings us to the hamartia in this near-Aristotelian tragedy, his association with gangsters. Hoffa talks with the mob early, with Ciaro as translator, because he needs strong-arm help in his union wars. In a struggle that involves bashing--a lot of it endured by Jimmy himself--he sees nothing out of order in enlisting specialists in bashing, who see ways for a strong union to benefit them. (Says Sloane: "The underworld leaders were no less obliging to Hoffa than they had been to their other allies--including, it should be noted, many politicians.")
This alliance, though it is never quite the camel's head in the tent, proves impossible to disentangle. The screenplay shows how it engages the attention of Robert Kennedy, who, first as a Senate committee counsel and later as attorney general, is obsessed with "getting" Hoffa, although he never does. (Hoffa was finally ensnared not by mob associations but--which the screenplay does not clarify-by attempts at jury tampering in a trial of his and by a real estate deal. He spent nearly five years in prison before President Nixon, politically motivated, commuted his sentence.)
The film sizzles with Hoffa's contradictions, his quirks and loyalties, his courage and his conspiring. What is scanted is his family life. His wife appears mostly on the platform with him at tumultuous union meetings, but she was much more to him than a showpiece for the members. He was a fanatically faithful husband among cronies who were frequent call-girl clients. He was a zealous father, as puritanical at home as he was profane elsewhere. A pity that this contradiction couldn't have been included, too.
While Hoffa is in prison, union power shifts. When he is released and tries to regain his place, he is rebuffed. He goes to the mob for help, but they like the way things are. Hence the ending.
That ending, the specifics of it, is Mamet's invention--nobody knows what really happened--and it's his most problematic touch. The film would have been better off with an unspecific ending, a clear indication that Hoffa was going to be done away with and a closing title telling us that, for the FBI, the case is still open. Instead we see the killing as imagined by Mamet. There's no intrinsic reason for this killing to have been delayed five or six hours at the roadhouse, and there's no way the killer could have known that Ciaro was, at that moment, unarmed. The hit men then bring up a truck to take away Hoffa's car with his body in it. In point of fact, the car was left there, empty.
But Hoffa's color, flash, egotism, bulldog brutality, bulldog tenacity are all in the film--the guts, the crassness and cleverness, together with a top man's blindness to the turning of the calendar page. Who is the American actor who could best embody all these qualities? Exactly the man who plays Hoffa--Jack Nicholson.
With little cosmetic change--chiefly a Hoffa haircut--Nicholson looks right; and he inhabits the man. To put it riskily, he doesn't merely act the role, he revels in it. If there is an occasional tinge of overacting, we're eager to excuse him because the whole is so fine and because the overacting could credibly be Hoffa's own. There's a third reason: Nicholson who to my knowledge has never acted in the theater, is nonetheless theatrically large, sometimes a touch outsize. (Some powerful singers, we're told, occasionally crack wine glasses.)
Two others in the big cast need special mention. Armand Assante, as a mob lieutenant who becomes a capo, shows again that he was born to fill a screen--easily. As Ciaro, DeVito is vital and endearing.
And he does it while directing energetically, enthusiastically. The film could have been visually repetitious with its recurrent meetings and conventions, but DeVito finds fresh ways to treat them. He has a liking for two old-timey devices: the very intense close-up to end a sequence (he zooms in on one of Ciaro's eyes at the end of the first sequence as if moving into the memories in his head) and the segue through blending (applause at the end of one sequence blends into the applause that begins the next). But their old-timiness fits the period.
Above all, as if wanting to match the size of Hoffa's life and of Nicholson's acting, DeVito lays in immense crowd scenes (well shot by Stephen H. Burum). The clash of pickets and strikebreakers in a large square, the tidal wave of the press corps flooding down courthouse steps, the turbulence of a waiting crowd seen through a large window as leaders converse in the foreground, the almost manic celebration at a union election--DeVito choreographs them all splendidly. Did he study Eisenstein?
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