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Just don't go across the river. Writer-director John Sayles calls his shoestring epic City of Hope, but to the movie tourist, his fictional Hudson City, N.J., offers a panorama of venality. The mayor's on the take. The establishment is in his pocket and riffling through everyone else's. The local contractor has to let thugs burn one of his buildings down to keep his lay- about son out of jail. The fading Italo grandees and the blacks on the rise are fighting over scraps, as if they were two generations of a homeless family. It's business as usual for a society at toxic twilight.
What a superb film these stories could make! And what a stately mess Sayles has made of them. The three dozen characters he spills onto the wide screen weave past one another, or arrantly collide, like sodden sparring partners. Talk like them too -- Damon Runyon gonifs gone sourly self-conscious. Thanks to cinematographer Robert Richardson, the picture looks great. But it has a tin ear and a soft head. The complex evil of which a big city is capable deserves better than this reductio ad urbem.
It deserves Homicide, David Mamet's dandy morality play, where bad things not only happen to good people, they are caused by them. Bobby Gold (Joe Mantegna -- tops) is an exemplary detective, a daring persuader, who thinks of himself as traditional cops do: in his heart he's Irish. "Let's go see who did what to who," he says, ready to sweet-talk black malefactors into custody. When he's yanked off a big case to handle the murder of an old Jewish woman, he bleats like a kidnapped child. But Bobby is Jewish by blood, and he soon finds out how deep that river runs. Resentment cedes to curiosity, then to admiration, then to a kind of principled betrayal. And as often happens when people follow their root obsessions, everyone loses big.
Mamet, tweaking orthodoxy, teaches a truism of urban survival: You're what you do (cop work) more than what you are (a Jew). As always, the lesson is in the way his characters say it -- whether ornate and muscular, like a Dali tattoo on a sailor's bicep, or as direct as a ransom note. "I'm 'his people' ?" Bobby asks the boss who assigns him to the Jewish case. "I thought I was your people, Lou." That's the kicker to living in the city. Everyone's related; everyone's alone.