LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN PART II: HOFFA, THE PUBLIC EYE
As I said before, 1992's trend was the biopic, with epic films made about Charlie Chaplin and Malcolm X. Another biopic made that year was Danny DeVito's HOFFA, about the controversial labor leader. And, if you want to stretch things a bit, there was also Howard Franklin's THE PUBLIC EYE, which was inspired by the life of famed tabloid photographer Weegee. Franklin's film is compelling, while DeVito's, unfortunately, is not.
Even today, no man is more synonymous with labor unions than Jimmy Hoffa. Starting out as a truck driver for a grocery store, he soon rose to become the biggest union leader in the country, orgainizing the Teamsters (the truckers union). His rise to the top had less to do with charisma and more to do with the fact that workers always saw him as "one of the guys" (rarely, if ever, was he accused of selling out to management), and because he often made deals with the mob to keep management from beating up anyone who dared joined a union. That last part also got him into trouble, as he was accused of using his mob connections to muscle not only management but workers undecided about unions, and he had several run-ins with the law, most notably being investigated by Robert Kennedy. And then on July 30, 1975, he vanished, and has been presumed dead ever since.
Hoffa's life is definitely movie material - in fact, Norman Jewison's F.I.S.T. (1978) was inspired by Hoffa's life. But DeVito's film doesn't really do the material justice. As with CHAPLIN, this is told in flashback, starting from when Hoffa (Jack Nicholson) and his right-hand man Bobby Ciaro (DeVito) - a composite character - are waiting for a meeting on the day Hoffa disappeared. Ciaro flashes back to when he first met Hoffa, as a truck driver himself. Though Ciaro gets fired because he met with Hoffa, he joins up with him anyway, and it's through his eyes we see Hoffa's rise, his dealings with mobsters like D'Allesandro (Armand Assante) - another composite character - his battles with RFK (Kevin Anderson), and his betrayal by fellow union official Frank Fitzsimmons (J.T. Walsh).
All of this looks impressive enough - DeVito and production designer Ida Random certainly make a convincing period piece - but it never gets you involved. That's because DeVito and writer David Mamet aren't interested, or so it seems, in explaining about Hoffa's life to anyone who didn't already know. While it's admirable, in a way, that they don't try to make a conventional biography and give a Freudian explanation for everything, it's frustrating that you never know what makes Hoffa tick. I'm not saying we needed to know more about his personal life (we only get brief glimpses of his family), but something would have helped. The actors aren't helped by this. Nicholson certainly looks the part, and he sounds the part, but his performance is all surface and little depth. And you sense no reason why he and DeVito would be so close other than plot purposes. They, however, are at least watchable, while Anderson, with a grating accent, is pretty bad. And while Walsh tries, he doesn't have much to work with (Assante doesn't either, but he at least seems to have the freedom to create something, and he manages to be compelling everytime he's on-screen).
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