MAD CITY (Warner Bros.) Starring: Dustin Hoffman, John Travolta, Alan Alda, Mia Kirshner, Ted Levine, Robert Prosky, Blythe Danner. Screenplay: Tom Matthews. Producers: Arnold Kopelson and Anne Kopelson. Director: Costa-Gavras. MPAA Rating: PG-13 (profanity, adult themes, violence) Running Time: 100 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
In Costa-Gavras' new drama MAD CITY, reporter Max Brackett (Dustin Hoffman) stumbles onto the story of a lifetime exactly when his career needs it most -- and his soul needs it least. Once a network news star, Brackett has been serving time in the journalistic gulag of Madeline, California since insulting anchorman Kevin Hollander (Alan Alda) on the air. While doing a puff piece at a local museum, Brackett finds himself staring at his return ticket to the big time when laid-off security guard Sam Baily (John Travolta) storms the place with a gun to demand his job back, then inadvertently shoots another guard and ends up taking a group of school children hostage. Sam wants nothing more than to get out alive; Brackett sees a chance to guide the story by becoming ringmaster of the ensuing media circus as Sam's mouthpiece and de facto press secretary.
Twenty years ago, a film like MAD CITY would have been a provocative and disturbing exploration of how television news can exploit a story to feed our blood-lust. In fact, it was...it was called NETWORK. Paddy Chayefsky's brilliant script and Peter Finch's mesmerizing final performance as unraveling anchorman Howard Beale made NETWORK a classic of dark satire, spotlighting the natural culmination of an obsessive pursuit of ratings. It was just outrageous enough to be entertaining, and just plausible enough to be alarming.
MAD CITY arrives in a different era. The notion that televison news isn't just about the news...well, it just isn't news. It never manages to arouse much more than nods of recognition, because the images and situations are familiar to the point of cliche: Alda's self-important anchorman, the selective editing of a story to fit a pre-determined agenda, the absurdity of a growing media feeding frenzy. As an ethics lesson, it's strident but ineffective, preaching to a nation of converts about a problem they all know exists but have no idea how to correct.
It's fortunate, then, that MAD CITY does a solid job of giving its subject a human face. That face doesn't belong to Dustin Hoffman, though Brackett is the story's central character. Watching his developing crisis of conscience -- and similarly the conversion of Brackett's naive assistant (Mia Kirshner) into a cutthroat reporter -- becomes a chore as the script slogs toward the inevitable. No, it is John Travolta who creates the most vivid portrait in MAD CITY as a man overwhelmed by circumstances before he has any idea what they are. Playing simple challenges any actor, yet Travolta plays simple with a disarming effectiveness. His trust that Brackett will act in his best interest is wonderfully misguided; his incredulous expressions as Brackett takes over an interview with Larry King capture the realization that the media's best interests are always their own. Sam Baily acts as a stand-in for everyone who sees the media going berzerk over things they barely comprehend.
The relationship moments between Baily and Brackett are among the strongest in MAD CITY, though it also provides a few chuckles as the public sympathies sway in the breeze. Like most "message" films, however, it begins to wilt every time it underlines its message. MAD CITY's primary stumbling block is its obviousness -- of the character developments, of the plot progression, of the scolding tone the film takes towards its targets. It reaches an audience which doesn't find sensationalism disturbing, but it delivers its story as though no one else had told it before. That's two places NETWORK was prescient: telling the story of media gone mad, and anticipating viewers who would come to find the madness tolerable.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 media blitzes: 6.
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