Koch (FILM REVIEW)
Koch
Film Review
by Kam Williams
Bittersweet Biopic Paints Evenhanded Post Mortem on Life and Times of Late NYC Mayor
Ed Koch (1924-2013) was the mayor of
New York from
1978 to 1989, a three-term tenure over the course of which the city was beset
by everything from racial strife to urban decay to the AIDS epidemic. To some,
a feisty leader like Koch was precisely the right remedy for that mix of urban maladies.
To others, he was simply too divisive a figure to forge a diverse coalition
representative of every ethnicity.
To his credit, Koch did clean up
Times Square and bring the city back from the brink of bankruptcy, even if he
did irreversibly alienate the black community ab initio by closing Sydenham Hospital
in Harlem right after entering office. That
controversial move motivated Calvin Butts, pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist
Church, to say: “He’s
worse than a racist. He’s an opportunist!”
Ever the optimist, Koch was
nevertheless fond of always asking his constituents: “How’m I doing?” Although
the feedback he received was generally positive, another African-American
detractor, Reverend Tim Mitchell was prompted to respond, “You’re not doing
well, you’re racist, and the people know it!”
So unfolds Koch, a warts-and-all
documentary directed by Neil Barsky.
Overall,
the movie might strike the viewer as a bit of a hatchet job, but that’s only
because it opened in theaters on the very day he passed away. And when somebody
dies, that’s a time for obituaries which tend to focus on the positive, not on
“the evil that men do.”
Therefore,
fans of the film’s recently-deceased subject might be distressed to see their
beloved hero posthumously pilloried. For, the tough-talking politician
frequently takes it on the chin here, from the gay slurs “Vote for Cuomo, not
the homo!” which surfaced during the 1977 campaign to the allegations of
corruption which sank his futile attempt to win a fourth term in office.
At one juncture, when asked his
sexual preference, Koch sort of loses it, responding, “It’s none of your
[bleeping] business!” To deflect rumors from spreading, especially after a
longtime associate, Richard Nathan, claimed to be his spurned lover, he began
making plenty of public appearances with Bess Myerson, the first Jewish Miss America on his
arm.
Ultimately, the coup de grace was
delivered to Koch’s career when many Democratic machine bosses holding powerful
positions in his administration were exposed as crooks. This forced the voters
to face the fact that the man who had originally run as a reformer on a
platform promising to clean up City Hall had himself tragically morphed like
the characters in Orwell’s “Animal Farm” into just another hack politician with
his hands in the cookie jar.
The rise and fall from grace of a
good Jewish boy gone bad who ostensibly sold out the Big Apple but never summoned
up the courage to come out of the closet.
Excellent
(4 stars)
Rated
Running time: 95 minutes
Distributor: Zeitgeist
Films
To see a trailer for Koch, visit:
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