Sunday Review: Broken City and Gangster Squad

Dubious urban mythologies

By Jonathan Price

So a few weeks after New Year’s we have two police films with old themes set in the two traditional American urban police meccas, New York and Los Angeles, though parts of the first were apparently shot in Louisiana, which has superior skyscrapers and a former mayor under indictment, which is eventually what happens to the New York mayor in Broken City. One way of thinking about film, other than wondering how faithfully it replicates the book on which it was based, is to think of it in terms of genres. These two, more or less, fit the cop genre, which arguably has replaced the Western genre, which reached its apogee in the 1950s, and began to be “revised” in the 1970s (think Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, McCabe and Mrs. Miller) before it dwindled to almost nothing in the current era. What cop and Western genre have in common is violence, an absolutist sense of right and wrong mixed in with a mythology about what is otherwise a series of real events and places. At the center is a redeeming and noble figure who enforces the law or at least justice. Underlying the Western was often a hidden eschatology of religious transcendence, as for example, when Shane ascends into the mountains at the end, a kind of Christlike martyr to the violence and inequality of Western economics and politics.
    The cop film, unlike the Western, has a much more tenuous hold on mythology as its viewers live in the place and era virtually contemporary with events which often seem all too real, while the Western is about a historical moment and place so vaguely understood by most viewers that myths about it can prevail. The urban landscape of cop films indulges in mythologies which become dubious, as in the current two films under consideration.

The Los Angeles of Gangster Squad (directed by Ruben Fleischer) was a real place, a post-World War II melange of returned soldiers, boosterism, entrepreneurship, and, in this case, invading gangsters from the East, like Mickey Cohen. (The East as a place of corruption was also an underlying motif of many Westerns, juxtaposed against the supposed virtues of magnificence and eternity of Western landscapes.) Cohen survived his time in LA and eventually died in his sleep in his 70s, though you’d never guess this from the film, which has a kind of gunfight at the OK Corral shootout as a climax. But its team of cops-turned-gangster-exterminators is admirably varied, with a returned World War II veteran, an idealist with surprising motivations, a Western sixshooter specialist, his Hispanic sidekick, and a communications expert. The success of their exploits is pretty much mythological, as when five of them endure a cordon of numerous thugs with machine guns protecting Mickey in a downtown hotel.
    The series of confrontations and shootouts does build up the suspense, and the portrayal of Cohen by Sean Penn is extraordinary, as a supreme narcissist who thinks he is God and has misbehaving subordinates torn apart by two automobiles, as if we have returned not to the violence of the old West, but to the drawn-and-quartered punishments of much earlier times. Other historical figures from Los Angeles and the late forties emerge, such as Thomas Parker,the police chief at the time, and Darryl Gates, chief of a latter era. No one in the film seems particularly disturbed by the fact that the squad, composed of policemen, violates everyone’s civil rights and a series of laws and doesn’t arrest criminals, but assassinates them.

The New York of Broken City (directed by Allen Hughes) replicates the urban atmosphere of a number of films where the mayor is thoroughly corrupt and slick, despite the fact that New York’s last four mayors (Bloomberg, Giuliani, Dinkins, Koch) have rarely been accused of corruption. This is quite a transformation, as if the evil cattle baron of the Western in historical fact had been a peacable vegetarian sheepherder. But the mayor’s corruption here seems to be a given of the genre. The retired cop Billy Taggart (Mark Wahlberg), is befriended by and hired by the mayor and then becomes entangled in a plot of assassination, lies, and fiscal corruption. Aside from its lack of contemporary plausibility, the explanation for the corruption seems farfetched and an accident of script. It’s a bit like a failed McGuffin, a term originated by Alfred Hitchcock to describe a mysterious piece of information which the protagonist and the audience were searching for throughout the film (e.g., what is the meaning of “the 39 steps”?), but by the end we don’t much care about it, and it’s largely irrelevant to what we have learned about human behavior and politics.

    The McGuffin in Broken City is an unconvincing and unsatisfying motivator. Here Mayor Hostetler (Russell Crowe) is unconvincing in his performance as a manipulator and corrupter. He gets $4 billion for the city from the sale of some apartment towers, which eases its financial problems, even if it may displace poor renters; his wife is unfaithful, but he is apparently chaste. He initially helps Billy as a policeman avoid a guilty verdict because it wouldn’t be good for the city, but Billy is required to resign from the force. In the film’s main action Hostetler has hired Billy as a private detective to look into his wife’s affairs (pun intended). Somewhere here, especially in the estrangement from his wife and his use of political/violent manipulatives, Hostetler seems to echo, albeit dimly, the monster portrayed as the mayor of Chicago in the Starz TV series Boss. But that boss is a true monster and he’s hiding urban pollution of massive proportions and he betrays his own daughter and his staff and his anointed successor and is also suffering from a terminal illness and some form of temporary dementia. And he comes from a city we associate with highhanded political manipulation and all forms of corruption. But Hofstetler has to be corrupt and manipulative, apparently, to make this genre work.
    As the layers are pealed back we learn the mayor was trying to suppress information. What information? Something about those apartment towers. They were sold to another company. Yet a third company was involved in the transaction, but it’s not clear exactly what they do or why they will get the majority of the profit. In the revelation of the McGuffin, it turns out the mayor was an officer in that third company, and that explains his use of Billy, his assassination of his opponent’s campaign manager, and everything. Huh? Like most McGuffins, this is also revealed so quickly that we are not to question its logic or practicality, or even why it took the mayor seven years to become so venal (apparently he’s angling for an unprecedented third term, which Bloomberg was able to achieve: no one suspects Bloomberg is corrupt, because he started political life as a gazillionaire).
    Even less convincing is the variety of motivations of those surrounding the mayor. Billy is vouchsafed many revelations by his police chief, who seems only a shade less corrupt and manipulative than his putative boss; and he’s actually the one having the affair with the mayor’s wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones), though we don’t see the two even interested in each other. Jack Valliant(Barry Pepper), the mayor’s opponent in the election , never appears sincere and offers only vague alternatives to the policies of Hostetler—even though he’s supposed to be the political white knight who will save the city—from what?
    The mythologies multiply in Billy’s behavior as private eye and police enforcer. He beats up or threatens everyone, even innocent parties. When Valliant’s campaign manager is found dead outside an apartment, the police arrive and Valliant is discovered hiding inside. He’s questioned by the police chief and Billy (who, after all, has no official status at this point) and seems embarrassed and reticent. Billy repairs to a bathroom and starts running water in the tub; eventually he takes Valliant there and offers him the urban cop-private eye version of water boarding. To find out what? That Valliant is gay, and that he wouldn’t defend his lover and friend, that the campaign manager had something on the mayor. When Valliant divulges this information, he is quite congenial and comfortable with Billy, not seeming to be at all resentful or fearful of someone who had just tried to drown him. But the scene makes no sense to me, except to show Billy is relentless in pursuit of the truth. What’s so startling about a gay figure in a mayoral election in 2012, especially in New York, where one of the mayoral candidates this year is a lesbian? Even less plausible, what’s so strange about a candidate and his campaign manager meeting in an apartment? Valliant’s reticence is just inexplicable, except as an excuse for an exercise in pseudo-police brutality. To me he seems guilty of nothing except inexplicable silence and reticence, which justify a near-drowning to extract a non-confession.
    Other characters in this movie just don’t seem to act like the human beings I know, which might be excused if it were set in a foreign country or were Startrek, or if I were a hermit. Billy’s attractive live-in girlfriend Natalie Barrow of seven years breaks up with him one evening out because he goes off the wagon one night and starts drinking heavily. It’s over, like that, no moving out, no phone calls, no lingering discussion. Well, I supposed that could explain why Billy’s interrogation technique is so brutal. We never see or hear from his love again, though Katy Bradshaw—his secretary, girl-of-all-work and bill collector, and the only character in the film with heart—does offer some hope when she hands him a gift at film’s end, a phone card, so he can call her from prison.
    Maybe the problem here is that this is a film without heroes or anyone worthy of admiration, conviction, or a vote. Billy does make the self-sacrificial gesture at the end, so the evil mayor (Hostetler) can be defeated. But up to that point Billy was merely a directionless private detective with a penchant for violence. The only thing broken at the end of Broken City is your heart, that films of such little conviction and imagination are actually made by such talented actors and director.
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Copyright © 2013 by Jonathan Price

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