A Film Canon

Positioned somewhere between the neorealism of The Naked City and the hyperrealism of The Wire, City Hall was the first film to be shot within the precincts of New York's City Hall. As this might suggest, its drama is more administrative than affective, more infrastructural than interpersonal. For the most part, character is subsumed into administrative function and position, or at least only exists as the friction between different components of the administrative machine, just as narrative exists primarily as a certain elasticity between administrative spaces - a concrete reminder, for debt-ridden 90s New York, that infrastructure still exists. As a result, the ostensible thrust of the film - the relationship between mayor John Pappas (Al Pacino), deputy mayor Kevin Calhoun (John Cusack), and Brooklyn borough president John Anselmo (Danny Aiello), in the aftermath of a shooting - feels simultaneously truncated and distended, as if it were merely an episode in a much more expansive television series, or film sequence; an expose of organised crime and corruption, but with the focus on the organisation. Like David Simon, Harold Becker understands this connective, organisational tissue as homosocial mortar - menschkeit, "the space between a handshake", as Pappas describes it - meaning that the film's relative disinterest in individual relationships doesn't make it emotionally disinterested per se, but more preoccupied with circulation than transaction; a cascade of lips caressed against ears, the probationary carousel of "sweetheart contracts, inside information, golden parachutes."