DeVito's direction is crammed with overstated kinesics that appear wholeheartedly consistent with Bobby's exceedingly highlighted reminiscences of life with Jimmy. It's a skillful work of fiction, rooted in fact, devised with ingenuity and a dependable viewpoint. It doesn't pose as a docudrama or anything close. The film proposes there are occasions when one must reason for oneself. It compels us to decide for ourselves, something that can be infinitely puzzling as well as gratifying. This gives this forgotten '90s drama an indignantly cynical tone that is generally uncommon in American movies. While Bobby's remembrance is tender, this captivating, hazy biopic sees all coolly. As the hours drone on in the lot, Bobby sequentially recalls his way through Jimmy's career. He worries about Jimmy's state of affairs, remembering their first meeting in the Depressed 1930s when, one night on the road, Jimmy invited himself into his truck and tried to enlist him for the teamsters. The reminiscences that are the bulk of the film aren't Jimmy's, but the indulgent, diligent Bobby's. The movie opens as the edgy, dog-tired Jimmy, convoyed by his committed odd-job guy, conjured character Bobby, waits in a Cadillac in a Detroit cafeteria lot for a rendezvous with an abiding Mafia accomplice. Without commentary, in very broad strokes, they authenticate Hoffa's advancement from minor reformer to big-time shark, power-dealer and mob friend. DeVito and the Great Character Development Skeptic neither romanticizie him or try to explore Hoffa outside his own mechanical justification that you have to do it to others before they do it you. It's a quintessentially American story, for only here did Big Labor become a big business to rival Big Business. In the context of most commercial movies, which insist on explaining too much or repeating the obvious, Hoffa remains a reasonably detached consideration of the career of a man whose ties to the Mafia not only cost the rank-and-file teamsters millions but also set a pattern for corruption that tainted the entire labor movement. Several may be uneasily startled: This stylistic take on the life and mysterious disappearance of the Teamsters Union leader views Robert Kennedy as seen by Hoffa: a bellyaching Harvard-educated well-to-do, frantic for exposure, prepared to use evenhanded ways and biased to catch Hoffa, no equal at all for Hoffa in their incensed altercations. Written with callous virtuosity by Mamet, directed with garishly vintage technique by DeVito, this hugely underrated, passionate, powerful film not only portrays Hoffa with the enhanced corporal magnitude of Nicholson, who gives a massive thrust of a performance, but it also reshuffles the ladder of American heroes as it's recognized nowadays.
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