In Which We Receive A Police Escort At All Times

Oscar Isaac's Digestive Tract

by DICK CHENEY

Show Me A Hero
creators David Simon, William F. Zorzi & Paul Haggis

Nick Wasicsko (Oscar Isaac) flirts with a secretary at City Hall in Yonkers. He corners her and leans over, letting the bacon and gasoline smell of all the men in this New York City suburb wash over her in an awesome wave. He won't leave her alone, and demands they go out for "steaks." When she is ready to be taken home, he demurs and lets her find her own ride, explaining that he is too hyped up and tired at the same time, mixing Maalox in with his usual vodka drink.

Creeping on the secretaries at City Hall does not remind one of heroism necessarily.

Obnoxious Bruce Springsteen plays throughout. David Simon (David Simon) is from Washington D.C., so he probably does not understand that Bruce Springsteen is closely associated with New Jersey. No one in Show Me A Hero, an HBO miniseries about how poor ethnic minorities were basically doomed until the federal government made available public housing in the area, openly dislikes Wasicsko, and most feel sorry for him. He has no choice but to support compliance with the ruling of a Jewish judge (Bob Balaban), and to order to signify his agreement, he wears the world's worst wig.

After she gets off her shift, it's off to the runway where she earns her children's lunch money.

Alma Febles (Ilfenesh Hadera) is a Dominican woman raising three kids who can't afford anything except a cute winter sweater and a movie ticket after her salary is deducted from her rent. She relocates her family to the DR and everything is perfect, but she can't find gainful employment so she heads back to America, where she wears the most adorable onesie I have ever seen. Show Me A Hero is a True Story™ but it feels about as real as Hadera looks in this part.

I was in Wal-Mart the other day and there was an Ethnic Hair Care section. True Story.

Isaac seems to be playing the exact character he did in A Most Violent Year, and he is even wearing the same hairpieces. The struggle for housing rights mostly takes place in courtrooms and offices. It was necessary to make this more exciting for the purposes of television so the awful music of Bruce Springsteen was brought into the diegesis, and the visual composition of the scenes is 13.9 percent the legs of Winona Ryder:

Gentlemen, one of you will go home with Winona. Reach for the piece of paper under your chairs.

Ryder plays Vincenza Restiano, a longtime New York politican whose legs were the central part of this important legal battle. In one scene she asks Wasicsko to meet up with her so she can explain how depressed she is that she was voted out of office for a white man. "Give me your stress!" she begs him.

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Instead he gives his stress to the secretary Nay (Carla Quevedo) who also lives with her mother. They bond over this important commonality. An important subplot features Doreen Henderson (Natalie Paul), an African-American who goes from the suburbs to the projects and watches her life fall apart. These sad stories took place less than thirty years ago, and they do not seem very dated at all. The problem with making history out of them is that it makes the production of Show Me A Hero seem like the dismissal of a worse time and place.

Nobody was like, 'Maybe using Bruce Springsteen songs will make people think this is about AIDS'?

Yonkers still exists. I was once there meeting with an official of the Catholic Church. He offered me a cigar and my choice of altar boy. New York is still hopelessly corrupt; the mayor seems to make all his important decisions based on which lobby has most recently absorbed the dust and decay from the underside of his scrotum. New York is a fucking mess: horses continue to shit all over Central Park.

Show Me A Hero was directed by Paul Haggis, since HBO owed him a favor after he appeared as an ex-Scientologist in Going Clear. He directs the show exactly like a lazier version of The Wire, which is everything it did not need. The overseriousness and clear black and white morality of Simon's writing reappears in Show Me A Hero, except we are a bit more inured to it by now. We were betrayed by The Wire: it now seems a terrible thing to make something look like a documentary when it cannot be.

You know David L. Simon wrote this when in this three minute scene, the judge walked to his office and read the newspaper.

The Wire admittedly had that feeling of versimilitude, but Show Me A Hero descends into silliness when it begins to try to give humanity to the anti-Semitic and anti-black homeowners in the Yonkers area. Simon dresses Catherine Keener as a senior citizen in a gray wig for some reason as one of these anti-integrationists. She looks absolutely absurd laughing when her anti-Semitic friends throw dirty diapers at a city council meeting held in full view of the public.

There is a funny scene in the first episode of Show Me A Hero where Simon has a leader of the NAACP confessing that he is not sure imposing federal housing in the Yonkers area is even the right thing to do. He explains his resignation to lawyer Michael H. Sussman (Jon Bernthal), who absorbs the cynicism into his own worldview. The show does not really attempt to explain why the government was set on doing this in the first place, which is kind of important to the whole story. 

The Dominican Republic looks like Eden in this show.

The direction here is all wrong. The documentary feel of The Wire — the handheld cam, the view of people in their natural habitats — has vanished, replaced by a smooth officiousness that makes Yonkers neater and tidier than it ever was. Although Isaac's charisma is like a volcano, focusing on the doomed Wasicsko was a mistake. At times Show Me A Hero feeds on the chaos of the political process so that the show almost transcends being a mere echo of Mr. Simon's past ventures, but it always retreats to Isaac doing the dull work of a politican. We never have very much fun.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording.

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In Which Jessica Chastain Resembles A Dinner Mint

Standard Oil

by ALEX CARNEVALE

A Most Violent Year
dir. J.C. Chandor
121 minutes

Oscar Isaac usually looks like a bunch of rolled up newspapers. Not here. As Abel Morales, the owner of a growing heating oil company in 1981 New York City, he moves swifty and surely through his muted world. In A Most Violent Year Abel never once makes a false move or second guesses himself; he has no idea what a crisis of conscience even is. Once, he gets slightly upset that his wife's handgun reminds him of a weapon a prostitute would use to protect herself. Other than that, he never alters his expression from a steely, viscous meow.

The world that revolves around Morales is filled with character actors of various ability: a menopausal Albert Brooks, a tense Alessandro Nivola and Glenn Flesher fresh off his role in True Detective. None offers much in the way of an antagonist. The closest thing to that is the prosecutor played by a masterful David Oyelowo, whose only scene with Jessica Chastain has all the romantic chemistry that Isaac and the dinner mint that is JC lack.

It seems unkind to shit on J.C. Chandor (Margin Call, All Is Lost) for making an exceedingly subtle movie in an environment where such machinations are lost on viewers used to television hammering home every single plot point. More happens in fifteen minutes of Boardwalk Empire than in the entire running time of A Most Violent Year. Unfortunately, nothing much lurks behind the subtlety of A Most Violent Year; there is instead a serious lack of emphasis on anything except the indifferent virtuism with which Morales regards the awful place he calls his home.

Morales has been the victim of about ten oil robberies when A Most Violent Year begins. The film concerns his search for the individuals that stole his trucks, as well as his desire to secure money to purchase a facility on the East River — after his bank drops out of the funding to pressure from his competitors and the government.

Morales' wife Anna (Jessica Chastain) keeps the books. Chastain accomplishes her usual effortless job of slipping into the skin of another human being, but she is really given quite little to do here. (She does not even get nude once.) Anna tells Abel that if he will not protect his family from the people that are hurting them, she will. In this:

In one particularly on-the-nose scene, unusual for the film, Chastain gets out of their car to execute a deer that they have accidentally injured. She shoots several times to be sure of the animal's death, as her husband looks on in horror. Anna is the daughter of a prominent Brooklyn gangster, and the concept of guilt by association that hovers at the margins of A Most Violent Year is never fully explored.

Hints are all we get. They paint a picture of a corrupt industry in which collusion and underhanded practices threaten the lives of anyone who challenges the preexisting power structure. This view is likely accurate - it is, however, neither eye-opening or very much fun. It is difficult to know exactly who A Most Violent Year is aimed at, situated on the median between period piece and industrial thriller. It is not particular gritty, but it is gloomy. Waking up from Chandor's film feels like drawing your head quickly out of a water bucket.

"I feel like I haven't seen the girls in days," Morales complains about his two young daughters.  One of them finds a gun in the bushes of their house, dropped by a would-be assailant. The magazine is loaded and the safety is off. We could have more than a few seconds with this moment, but instead we never even find out Abel's daughter's name. Her parents are too concerned with larger matters. In this world there is only one aspect of self that is ever worth paying attention to, and that is how it is projected on others, or conversely, violated by them.

Morales remains untarnished by the vanity, greed and idolatry he experiences in this version of New York City. The other world lingers at the outskirts of his, more peaceful by far. Eventually, we assume, there will be  lessening, a weakness, a lack of functioning in that intensity. That moment never arrives.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

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