Theater of the Absurd: Mad City

Mad City (1997)

I've recently seen two of the handful of movies that make TV news reporters out to look as stupid as they are cocksure, at least that's what the movies seem to express, and I'm not sure that I disagree.

The earlier stabs in this direction came from Kirk Douglas' The Big Carnival and Sidney Lumet's Network, where Howard Beale got the whole country chanting, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this any more!"

The third chapter in this charming poison pen letter to the TV media is 15 Minutes, where the tabloid TV host finds out his exclusive story rapidly spirals far beyond his control; that's the one I saw recently, and the one I saw today was Mad City.

Mad City is the story of a blue collar schmoe (John Travolta), with a low IQ, no education, and a minimum wage job who is fired when he is late for work. He comes into the museum where he used to work as guard and interrupts a has-been reporter (Dustin Hoffman) who is interviewing the manager for a piece of filler for the local TV station.

When the museum manager (Blythe Danner) fails to give Travolta a hearing he produces a shotgun and starts to threaten her, just so she will take him seriously he apparently starts out thinking. She slaps the muzzle of the gun away and Travolta fires it off without looking, putting a shot into the other guard's abdomen. There are also a herd of school children in the museum so now we have a hostage situation.

Hoffman begins to see the possibilities of resurrecting his career on the "merits" of this story. As the story begins to unfold per Hoffman's management, Hoffman runs interference for Travolta with the police who have surrounded the museum.

As the news media flocks to the museum Hoffman gains in stature as the various interests try to wheedle interviews out of him with Travolta. He finally settles on prime time with Larry King, snubbing his own network news guy from NY, a sickeningly Dan Ratheresque Alan Alda, whom Hoffman had clashed with earlier.

Alda takes the story, re-edits it, and puts a negative spin on it, opining that "these things always end the same way," leaving Travolta with little wiggle room; indeed, we knew from the beginning he never had any.

The cast is excellent, with Dustin Hoffman, John Travolta, and Alan Alda supported by Robert Prosky, Ted Levine, and a surprisingly good turn by Mia Kirschner as a news intern. The biggest drawback to the movie is the story, which is nothing you probably haven't seen before. Nearly anybody who analyzes the news media at all realizes the bias and outright deceit that they peddle daily as their bread and butter. The lack of shame is appalling yet they justify it saying if they don't do it, their rival will. Anyway, Hoffman starts out with the scoop of his career and once it balloons bigger than him he realizes that he has become the story and John Travolta's plight is only a sideshow in the theater of the absurd that he finds himself in.

Directed by Costa-Gavras (Z), the movie runs 114 minutes and is presented in color and in 2.35:1 theatrical format. There are several text based extras on the Warner Bros DVD.

People that enjoy seeing the media take a few well-deserved whacks will enjoy Mad City.