HOFFA
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1992 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: Danny DeVito's film is not so much a
biography of Jimmy Hoffa as a spectacularly illustrated
dossier. DeVito, with the aid of a David Mamet screenplay,
tells us that behind the forceful, ambitious public image of
Hoffa was a man who was ambitious and forceful. Rating: 0
(-4 to +4).
Something is missing in Danny DeVito's HOFFA. It is not the budget and it is not that the budget seems wasted. There is a lot of money on the screen in HOFFA. The film has an expensive star with a terrific make-up job (when I first saw the trailer and saw the face on the screen, I though "Hoffa" first and it took a beat to two to recognize it was Jack Nicholson I was looking at). The film also has spectacular action scenes of an acre of strikers in a melee with an acre of strike breakers. But what is missing and what is missed is a human behind the public face of Hoffa. What this film says about Hoffa, the man, is that he cusses and drinks coffee. Just about everything else about him in this film you could find in a good encyclopedia. That is, everything that is true in the film. In an afterword to this review I will give a few facts that do not square with this fictionalized version of the professional life of Jimmy Hoffa. There are probably other major deviations from the truth in this film.
As the film opens, Hoffa (played by Nicholson) is at a roadside diner with his longtime friend Bobby Ciaro (played by Danny DeVito outdoing the major role Spike Lee gave himself in MALCOLM X). Together they are waiting for the arrival of a third party. As they wait Ciaro remembers their long career together. They meet when Hoffa is a young man preaching the evangel of the union. Ciaro soon learns that his new acquaintance is happily willing to break the law and to hurt whomever he has to for the sake of organizing labor. While DeVito's character never finds love and looks for one-night stands, DeVito the director here finds his own true love--the overhead shot. Through much of the rest of the film DeVito carries on his torrid love affair with overhead shots. DeVito and overhead shots seem inseparable until in the last third he has a quick affair with artistic scene transitions.
DeVito's infatuation with overhead shots and artistic scene transitions notwithstanding, he does show some nice visual sense. One gets the impression that Hoffa (like the other enigmatic anti-hero of this film season, Dracula) rarely ventures forth in the daytime and then only when it is heavily overcast. This gives us a dismal recreation of Detroit. Hoffa comes off as a creature of the night more than willing to deal with the underworld if it suits the purposes of the union. Since we see almost none of Hoffa's personal life and little positive in his professional life, we are understandably ambivalent as to the fate of the union leader. Hoffa seems likable only when he is verbally tying knots in Robert Kennedy (played by Kevin Anderson). Kennedy, as you might guess, comes off less than favorably in this film.
DeVito's HOFFA is sometimes well-photographed and sometimes not. But its biggest failure is in getting us to care what happens to Jimmy Hoffa. My rating is a 0 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Afterword (with minor spoiler): Jimmy Hoffa disappeared on Wednesday, July 30, 1975. He expected a meeting at the somewhat fancy restaurant, the Manchus Red Fox. It is thought he was meeting a local crime figure. He arrived at the restaurant at about 2 PM. After a half hour, he called his wife to tell her that the others had failed to appear. At 2:45 PM or so he was seen in the parking lot getting into a car with some other men. This is clearly not events as shown in the film. Also, one might wonder why in the film Bobby Ciaro chooses this day to remember his whole past with Hoffa.
Mark R. Leeper
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