"Show me a hero," F. Scott Fitzgerald observed, "and I will write you a tragedy." The last two hours of the HBO mini-series so named illustrates this disheartening proposition. By comparison with the preceding four hours, these final episodes are briskly, if rather schematically, paced. A narrative of this scope generates many characters and subplots and the film must resolve (or, at least, decisively develop) all of these aspects of the story -- accordingly, the last two hours of the mini-series, really almost 2 and 1/2 hours since HBO is not required to tailor its programs to the strict half-hour and one-hour format of network TV, is a bit choppy and fragmentary -- in effect, a series of vignettes each about six or seven minutes long, rather frantically intercut. Nothing exactly comes into tight or clear focus and the final two episodes, although extremely interesting and sometimes moving, contain so many disparate things that the entire enterprise feels unresolved, tentative, and overly diffuse, even rushed. This effect, I should hasten to add is probably intentional -- the filmmakers seem striving for a kind of Olympian, Brechtian detachment: the story is epic in many respects, involving dozens of people striving for different objectives, across a period of years. Certainly, the reference to "tragedy" is misleading. Tragedy ordinarily involves a powerful, noble, and flawed person brought low by fate and the defects of his own character. In this regard, the protagonist of the film, its "hero" as it were, Nick Wasicsko, is too weak and feckless for tragedy -- thus, the film's title seems, more or less, ironic. Wasicsko is only accidentally a hero -- in fact, he is sleazy political opportunist who fell into a controversy that he had exploited for his own gain. For a few months of his life, he rallied his rather feeble powers and showed moral courage. Then, stripped of his office by reason of that courageous stance, Wasicsko spent the rest of his life trying to capitalize on his brief moment of virtue, betrayed everyone around him, and, at the first hint of serious trouble, absconded from the political arena by committing suicide. The film develops a theme rarely shown in the popular media -- how an essentially ignoble and cowardly person, cast into a position requiring great courage, was able, with his back to the wall, to demonstrate virtue, if only ephemerally, before collapsing back into his self-aggrandizing and opportunistic habits. It's not that Nick Wasicsko is a bad man or an evil person -- he is a just a trivial, inconsequential man, someone radically unsuited for the role in which history, very briefly, cast him. In any event, it seems clear to me that the implication that Show me a Hero is a tragedy is a kind of bitter joke. In this context, it is well to ask what the film is ultimately about -- although Wasicsko figures in about half of the scenes, ultimately, the film is not about him, but about the institutional process of desegregation, about public housing, and about political issues in a racially divided city. In this respect, the movie is ultimately more like one of Frederic Wiseman's enormous and panoramic institutional documentaries -- indeed, there is one of them called Public Housing -- than a typical HBO narrative. In fact, in a way the film would be superfluous if a reasonably comprehensive documentary about the events in Yonkers existed and most of the movie's principal points are made with pragmatic and cruel efficiency in Wiseman's film on the subject.
Notwithstanding these cavils, Show me a Hero improves in my view in its last third, picks us force once more, and seems to me to be both educationally effective and, intermittently, emotionally powerful. The conversion of a white woman who is an opponent to desegregation into an advocate for that process is moving and inspirational -- and, in fact, seems reasonably plausible to me. The hardships endured by the poor are convincingly portrayed and the inhabitants of public housing are effectively presented in all of their individuality. Some of these people are good, some of them are bad, and, indeed, exceedingly bad -- one young woman keeps getting pregnant by a jail bird who ends up serving 25 years for murder. Wasicsko's deterioration is presented in a matter-of-fact but disturbing way -- the former mayor attends the lottery in which tenants for the new desegregated townhomes are selected; no one pays any attention to him although his political sacrifice made the project possible. (Later, in a particularly effective scene, he goes to the townhome to introduce himself to the tenants, all of whom respond with incomprehension and hostility -- they simply don't know who he is). As he goes mad, Haggis, the director, uses some interesting camera effects -- first he shoots the weeping Wasickso in a middle shot in which his face is lost in shadow; then, he cuts to an extreme close-up that is smeared, overexposed, and almost indecipherable with intense light coming through an adjacent window -- Wasicskso's mood swings are rendered palpable by the contrast between dark and light. The film ends with a long inventory of the principle characters and a description of their present-day whereabouts -- in many cases the grave. I thought this was an unnecessary cliché and, although interesting, ethically questionable. (Some of the people portrayed in the movie are still alive, particularly the woman played by Winona Ryder who Wasiksco betrays politically -- and who, in turn, attempts gratuitously to destroy his marriage with hysterical slander. Presumably, this episode derives from some real event but it doesn't go anywhere in the film: the ex-mayor's wife asks about accusation, receives a categorical denial, and, then, drops the issue -- so what's the point in airing this dirty laundry and, further, do we really need to know that the woman who did this wicked thing is still alive and, more or less, where she lives?) The film also has an interesting gallery of closing credit photographs showing the actors in the movie and their real life counterparts -- this is also jarring in that it shows the preference in even highly realistic films for pretty people and Hollywood types; with one exception, a startling beautiful Jamaican woman, all of the actors and actresses and immensely more attractive than their real-life counterparts. (Al Sharpton, the famous race-baiter, was intensely involved in the desegregation battle -- although he is only mentioned once in the film; the closing credits show the reverend, not once but twice at least, as he appeared in 1988; today, as the suave moderator of his own MSNBC show, Rev. Sharpton weighs about one-half of what he weighed 27 years ago.
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