Beyond the Multiplex

"Giuliani Time": The rise and fall and rise of "America's mayor," with chapters yet unwritten
Kevin Keating's documentary "Giuliani Time" arrives right on time and right on message. With the former New York mayor clearly laying the groundwork for a presidential campaign, it's time America learned about Rudy Giuliani's real record in the Big Apple. While Keating's agenda is clearly hostile, and Giuliani's political committee is eagerly trying to do counter-propaganda, this isn't a campaign of character assassination or innuendo, but rather a dutifully constructed biographical film about a tremendously skilled prosecutor and politician.

Longtime Giuliani critics, like the Rev. Al Sharpton or New York Civil Liberties Union head Norman Siegel, are given no more screen time than, say, Manhattan Institute head Myron Magnet (whose Ben Franklin hairstyle is just as excellent as his name), to a large extent the intellectual driving force behind Giuliani's social policies. Keating's central source is the great New York muckraking journalist Wayne Barrett (recently ousted by the Village Voice's new regime), a Giuliani biographer who knows the former mayor well and who both admires and dislikes him, in roughly equal measure.

This makes for a highly effective mode of argumentation. Even those who are likely to support Giuliani's core policies -- stringent cuts in government services, an unforgiving focus on petty street crime and "quality of life" offenses, and tax cuts for rich individuals and big corporations -- may be disturbed by what they see in "Giuliani Time." Before the mayor was miraculously reinvented on and after Sept. 11, 2001, he had increasingly become seen in New York as a petty tyrant, driven by instinctive racial animosity, a Grinch-like lack of sympathy for those who are poor or struggling and a quasi-totalitarian mania for order.

I should say right here that I can claim no objectivity or neutrality when it comes to Rudy Giuliani. I lived in New York throughout his mayoralty, and as a white, middle-class Manhattanite, I arguably benefited from his obsession with cleaning out the central city and his regressive economic policies. On the other hand, my wife is a political activist who fought the Giuliani administration on many issues, including its long and devoted effort to sell off neighborhood community gardens to real estate developers. (She is also a plaintiff in a suit against the city, relating to police treatment of nonviolent demonstrators during the Giuliani era.)

Certain ugly episodes, like Giuliani's bizarre campaign to punish the Brooklyn Museum for an art exhibit he didn't like, are well known even to outlanders. Not everyone may know that the offending work, Chris Ofili's sexually explicit portrait of the Virgin Mary, done partly in elephant dung, is not in fact meant to be insulting or irreverent. Furthermore, this was hardly an isolated instance. Giuliani had a strange fixation with controlling and censoring art, pushing a case about whether the city could regulate street artists all the way to the United States Supreme Court. As any 1-800 lawyer out of a subway-car ad could have told him, it was an open-and-shut First Amendment case, and even the current court refused to hear it.

Other events, like the brutal sexual abuse inflicted on Abner Louima or the police killing of Amadou Diallo (an unarmed man shot down in a hail of 41 bullets), also made national headlines. Again, it's difficult to convey the atmosphere of mutual incomprehension around these tragedies: Rather than expressing concern and compassion, Giuliani became threatened, defensive, Nixonian. He seemed incapable of grasping that many black New Yorkers felt that he had given police free rein to harass them, beat them and even kill them if it brought the crime rate down another few points. Giuliani may or may not be a racist, but he was raised in an all-white Long Island suburb and plays to primal, almost atavistic big-city fears. The fact that he could be elected not once but twice while totally antagonizing the black population and essentially telling the rest of us that those people were the problem is, as Barrett notes, almost unbelievable.

For my money, the most important political argument in "Giuliani Time" is that Giuliani's cosmetic reforms had little to do with crime reduction, and a lot to do with making rich and middle-class white people in Manhattan and the brownstone neighborhoods of Brooklyn feel better about the city. Under the previous mayor, David Dinkins, crime had dropped sharply for three years before Giuliani took office in 1994. But Dinkins is a black liberal Democrat, so to this day, many people cling to the superstitious belief (argued vociferously by Giuliani during their '93 campaign) that he hated cops and coddled criminals. In fact, Dinkins had hired thousands of new police and introduced a street-level anti-crime campaign. (Some social scientists will tell you that crime rates are more a function of economic and demographic curves than anything mayors ever do, but that's another story.)

Of course, Giuliani's current national reputation rests on one event and one alone, and I'll just admit it: With the president hopping from air base to air base in scared-bunny mode, and the vice president plotting dark deeds down in Coup Central or whatever, Giuliani was the only grown-up human authority figure available on Sept. 11. For every American, and especially every New Yorker, he was a reassuring presence. No one doubts his spine or the force of his convictions, but "Giuliani Time" argues that taking the full measure of this man's dark and paradoxical character involves more than his courage and leadership on one painful day.

Republicans are openly pondering whether Giuliani can save them from a 2008 apocalypse. As Keating's film makes clear, his candidacy may pose as many political problems as solutions. Giuliani is a pro-choice, pro-immigration Catholic, and Barrett suggests that he covered up his father's colorful past as a Brooklyn mobster. Today's Southern-based, heavily Protestant Republican Party may not be eager to embrace all that, and perhaps we should be grateful. After all, a whole lot of New Yorkers were content with the central bargain Giuliani offered them: We'll get the panhandler off your corner, the homeless people out of the park and the graffiti off the subway. Just don't ask us how we did it.

"Giuliani Time" opens May 12 at the Sunshine Cinema in New York, May 26 in Boston and Washington, and June 16 in Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, with more cities to follow.

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