American cinema boasts a long social realist tradition, which for most of its history has been tied to a certain theatrical style, grounded in mid-century conventions whose foundations were entrenched by heaps of New Deal funding. In its heyday, this ethos made the gradual move from the stage to the screen, and resulted in directors like Elia Kazan and Sidney Lumet exploring complicated societal issues via a brash, actor-focused approach in which emotions ran high, and often verged over into florid bathos. These seminal qualities sustained themselves in various forms across the rest of the century, finding what might be a terminal point in 2004’s Crash, a best picture winner taken seriously at the time, but which has seen its reputation rightfully plummet in the years since, it’s ham-fisted schmaltziness typifying everything potentially wrong with a style rooted in such a forthright sense of earnestness.
Social realist conventions have since hidden out in the indie world, through a hybrid mode of presentation with equivalent roots in European neo-realism, in which the performances are more constrained, the message is less pointed, and the creative overreach often verges into exploitation rather than effusive melodrama. It’s most apparent descendants, on the other hand, are mostly found in the world of television, a medium this tradition also helped to originally pioneer.
One of the best examples of this is the work of David Simon, a former journalist keeping his issues-focused inquiries active through a series of socially-oriented ensemble pieces. His most famous work, The Wire, is also his most successful attempt at developing that ethos, pushing the character of Baltimore itself to the forefront, telling the story of a city through a litany of different viewpoints scattered across racial and economic lines. A decade earlier, however, there was John Sayles’ City of Hope, a film which covers very similar territory, albeit in much more compressed form. Like The Wire, it’s the rare work which actually earns the label novelistic, fitting considering that Sayles writes realist fiction in his spare time. Most importantly though, the two share that same mid-century style, a naturalistic presentation with emotions pitched to the rafters, full of characters besotted with an unanswerable sense of yearning, trading monologues in decaying locations whose rot reflects their own inner degradation.
Produced at a moment of unique turmoil for many urban centers, City of Hope stresses the essential inter-connectivity of the city, a condition which is suggested to extend to humanity as a whole. The focus is a municipality which in this case is never named, but based on accents and ethnic makeup, appears to be a New York City satellite that might be in New Jersey or somewhere upstate, a place where rust belt prosperity has bottomed out into a sense of aimless desolation. The film itself was shot in Cincinnati, although the fact that a name is never explicitly named seems intentional, expanding upon the purposefully vague relatability of the situation.
At the center of the narrative is Nick Rinaldi (Vincent Spano), the son of well-connected real estate developer Nick Rinaldi (Tony Lo Bianco), whose initial aim of providing his family with a solid economic foundation has led to an uncomfortable involvement with the local mob. Disgusted with his father’s growing corruption, Nick starts the movie by walking off a job site where he’s been installed in a no-work sinecure, intent upon finding his own path. He does so by attempting to rob an electronics store with a pair of idiot friends, a hasty, poorly conceived scheme whose failure inspires the rest of the events of the film.
The messy entanglement of this father-son squabble also informs all successive developing conflicts, which share an uneasy sense of intimacy between the warring parties. Nick strikes up a romance with his old high-school crush Angela (Barbara Williams), raising the ire of her cop ex-husband Rizzo (Tony Denison). Brimming over with rage, Rizzo humiliates a pair of Black teens who just happen to be roaming around the white part of town, and the two exorcise their shame and aggravation by assaulting a jogger, setting the town’s simmering racial tensions to a high boil. The polar opposite to the charming but irresponsible Nick, the key character here is the Black city councilman Wynn (Sayles regular Joe Morton), who serves as the film’s moral center, struggling to keep his career afloat while mediating the conflict.
With all these pieces in place, the plot chugs along efficiently, leading to an outcome in which some conflicts are settled and others remain unresolved. Key to the film’s success is the fact that, unlike many modern social-realist directors, Sayles is also an astute formalist, one with a keen awareness of his debt to theatrical traditions. This inter-medium connection is mostly exhibited in the lighting, which pursues an aggressively expressionist approach, at points casting unnaturally vivid colors achieved through the use of gels. Drawing out the dissonance between realism and staginess rather than attempting to obscure it, City of Hope amplifies its formal disjunctions in a manner that rhymes with its narrative action. This is accomplished in an expressive method that, in a modern movie would likely be managed in less dramatic fashion, through the scourge of post-production color grading. In scenes of anger, it’s often just overly bright sun glare flooding the shot, the blinding light wiping out any sense of nuance. At other times it’s the cool glow of sodium street lights, which seem to underscore softer moments, including a love scene shot in a similar fashion to one from Sayles’ later masterpiece, Lone Star, a work with an equally strong sense of place.
The final outcome is a complex mosaic profile which demonstrates social affinities without using this as a shortcut for stupid sentimentality. The film’s final image, in which a gravely injured character finds his pleas for help refracted out across a desolate downtown landscape dotted with half-completed high-rise constructions, is one that seems even more relevant in today’s climate of mechanized gentrification. Too often, urban centers are seen as valuable for their material resources, while the human ones which populate and vivify them are neglected and abused. Pulling off the always-difficult ensemble drama with a sense of precision and grace, City of Hope resonates as a late example of a largely mothballed tradition.
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