MAD CITY

John Travolta and Dustin Hoffman, two stars from separate generations who made their initial fame in youth-oriented social dramas, team up with director Costa Gavras (MISSING) to create MAD CITY. A loose remake of director Billy Wilder’s 1951 movie THE BIG CARNIVAL starring Kirk Douglas, MAD CITY is a tense, exciting and sometimes funny critique of what passes for TV journalism. The film is marred, however, by the superficial qualities that detract from many modern, big-budget social dramas in Hollywood as well as by some contradictory and confusing moral qualities.

Dustin Hoffman plays Max Brackett, a small-town TV reporter at station KXBD in Madeline, California, who longs to get back to big-time network news in New York. He lost his previous job after an on-air confrontation with network anchor Kevin Hollander (Alan Alda). Max thinks he has found just the ticket to get back to the Big Time when he accidentally stumbles on a hostage crisis perpetrated by laid-off museum guard Sam Baily (John Travolta). While Max is in the restroom, Sam points a shotgun at his former boss Mrs. Banks (Blythe Danner) to try to force her to give him his job back. The gun accidentally goes off, hitting another guard who Mrs. Banks didn’t lay off.

Max takes advantage of the situation, which includes a group of school children Sam holds hostage in the museum. Using his powers of persuasion, he convinces Sam to demand that the local police chief let Max interview Sam on TV. The chief disagrees at first, but even he is swayed by Max’s persuasive manipulation.

The interview doesn’t end the hostage crisis, however. The crisis worsens when the rest of the media outside the museum use their control of the cameras and microphones to make Sam look bad and to increase the strain on Sam’s marriage that the crisis creates.

For most of this movie, the interactions between Max and Sam, Max and the police, and Max and the network anchor make for an absorbing drama. Toward the end, however, Sam becomes dazed and angry because of the pills he takes to stay awake, and Max unexpectedly starts taking a self-righteous attitude toward the other journalists’ treatment of the story. Although Max is right in his appraisal of his peers, he seems unbelievably self-righteous because he was the one who engineered the whole media circus in the first place.

Furthermore, the movie doesn’t fully explain Max’s change of heart. In fact, Max is more believable, and his relationships with the other people are more believable, earlier in the movie when his talent for manipulation is shaded by his obvious concern that Sam not lose control of himself because Max doesn’t want to see the children physically hurt.

Ultimately, this problem with Max’s character keeps MAD CITY from becoming a really powerful movie. There are only a few references to religion: Sam belongs to “a church”; Sam asks forgiveness from the people he hurts; Sam’s boss tells him at one point that she will pray for him; and, a street preacher tells people the Bible has “news for all time.” Furthermore, the filmmakers’ apparent acceptance of Sam’s criminal act makes it hard to sympathize with the way that the movie morally indicts TV news. MAD CITY fails to probe deeply enough into the issues it tackles. The filmmakers’ don’t seem to be aware of their own manipulation of the film medium and the film-going public. Even so, the movie is mostly entertaining and insightful.