Hoffa
Written by David Mamet
Directed by Danny DeVito
With Jack Nicholson, Danny DeVito, Armand Assante
Showing in Hoyts city and suburban cinemas
Reviewed by Max Lane
Hoffa is a disappointing film — annoyingly so, given the opportunities offered by a film study, especially a fictionalised and therefore more flexible one, of such an important figure. Hoffa represented in many ways the fate of the modern US trade union movement and its contradictions.
Apart from more basic flaws, the film has numerous technical and directing faults. The fictional character of Hoffa's sidekick, played by Danny DeVito, appears in so many scenes and to so little purpose, that his presence starts to grate very quickly. Huge leaps in time are made without explanation and without showing how Hoffa developed from one situation to another.
Even in a simple potboiler, a thriller or run-of-the-mill comedy, it is necessary to show some causal links in the chain of people's behaviour. De Vito's Hoffa, played valiantly but on the whole in vain by Jack Nicholson, is not so much a personality as an archetype.
He is depicted as both a working-class street fighter/union militant and a corrupt union official/friend to the mafia. While there is some explanation of the political origins of his mafia connection (to get the mafia to stop providing thugs for strike breaking), there is no exploration of the contradictory position and politics that Hoffa pursued.
Hoffa just "is" — almost timeless and never changing. He is simply an emanation of his original personality: the street fighting, worker militant willing to "mix it".
It is Hoffa's willingness to get involved in a fight that DeVito dwells upon and uses to win support for Hoffa from the audience. This often works, whether in his early days when he is actually fighting on the street with the boss's thugs or when he has a face to face confrontation with the arrogant Bobby Kennedy, who is out get him. "Have you ever worked?", challenges Hoffa in the midst of a burst of proletarian profanity.
Hoffa's willingness to fight gained him his popularity with large sections of the Teamsters' Union membership, along with the fact that his methods did bring significant material benefits to the members.
In the film, in his speech accepting the presidency of the union, Hoffa swears he will never let the members lose their status as new entrants to the middle class. This one brief glimpse of Hoffa's politics, his role as a leader of the labour bureaucracy and labour aristocracy, his championing of "business unionism", is not brought out enough. This is not just a political weakness of the film but an artistic one as well. Without explaining how he could remain so popular while enriching himself and cooperating with the mafia, Hoffa remains a cardboard cut-out and a mystery.
There were and are many powerful union bureaucrats in the US. Hoffa used many of the same methods to come to power. He was guilty of the same bureaucratic approach. As late as the 1970s, he threw his weight behind the union-busting activities of the Teamsters in a campaign against the militant United Farmworkers Federation. In all these respects, he was similar to other reactionary union bureaucrats.
What made Hoffa unique and a part of working-class mythology in the US was his contradictory character. He never flinched from "mixing it", he maintained a policy of demanding national-based agreements with the employers, and he ensured his members' material benefits improved.
How was this contradiction possible, politically and psychologically? What made this contradictory person tick? This is what we never get. We never meet the real person, Hoffa. A pity. Like the sticker on many a teamster's truck in the months after Hoffa's mysterious assassination: Where is Jimmy Hoffa?