Down-and-dirty politics is the subject of Marshall Curry’s un-flashy but compelling documentary about the 2002 Newark mayoral race.
Made on a skimpy budget and
having aired last year on the PBS P.O.V. series, Marshall Curry’s nearly
one-man production is the fourth of the five 2005 Best Documentary Oscar
nominees to be shown theatrically in Philadelphia. It’s a look at the 2002
mayoral election in Newark, NJ, and if that doesn’t sound promising, at least
Curry has a charismatic leading man in Cory Booker. Raised in a
middle-class-suburb, the Stanford- and Yale- law educated ex-football jock
seemed poised to raise a serious challenge to the dynasty of the incumbent,
Sharpe James, a former councilman first elected mayor in 1986. A populist with
a rags-to-riches personal story, James sold himself as the man who helped
resurrect Newark with a flashy face lift of its once-moribund business
district. Booker’s message was that this supposed renaissance had left the poor
and working-class folks in town as bad or worse off than before.
But the film
is about the campaign, not the issues facing Newark. Whether or not James was a
good mayor, he and his people were clearly willing to fight dirty. The power of
his office allows him to intimidate the opposition. His opponent’s lighter (but
not white) skin allows him to race-bait. Despite the James campaign’s complete
unwillingness to cooperate with him, Curry gets some footage that actually made
me feel good about Philly politics by comparison. The Newark setting turns out
to be a good thing. When I watched War Room, the 1993 film to which this
has been frequently compared, the fact that I was already familiar with a lot
of the issues the Bill Clinton campaign had had to deal with made it a
disappointment. Here, I hadn’t heard of either candidate until I walked in the
theater, and yet by the end I really wanted Booker to win.
posted 9/9/13
