There are not many similarities between Emilio Estevez’s heavily metaphorical “The Public” and Jordan Peele’s “Us.” The former quotes more from “The Grapes of Wrath” instead of “Lost Boys” and is far closer in spirit to a Very Special Episode of “The West Wing” (which it feels like Estevez may have been bingeing) than an epic-sized “Twilight Zone.” But what Estevez and Peele have in common is a disquiet at the state of the nation and a sense that a good part of the citizenry has been done a great injustice. Admittedly, take far different routes to get to that point but they both highlight a vast issue—with arguably far different degrees of clarity—and leave the audience at the end with the sense that nothing has been solved. Not even close.
Estevez’s conceit is something of a “Breakfast Club”-echoing bottle episode using that old standby for easy dramatic tension: the hostage situation. Only in this instance, as Stuart, Estevez’s pensive and somewhat fussy librarian protagonist, keeps trying to tell everybody, it’s not a hostage situation. What the actual situation is, he’s not so sure. What happens about a half-hour into this frequently flat-footed movie-with-a-message is that at closing time in the main branch of the Cincinnati public library, Jackson (Michael K. Williams), one of the homeless men who spend most of their days there, tells Goodson they’re not leaving. It’s freezing outside, there’s no space available in any of the nearby shelters, and it just seems like time for a little public demonstration to remind folks that the homeless exist.
In a fit of pique, Goodson—a deceptively mild-mannered type with a not-well-hidden secret past—throws in with the hundred or so protestors. This does not please his boss (Jeffrey Wright) one bit. The police show up, with a SWAT team on call and a glowering hostage negotiator Bill (Alec Baldwin), who’d rather be on the streets looking for his junkie son. What follows is something of an anti-hostage movie, in which both the people barricaded inside and the cops hovering outside are trying to figure out what exactly is happening.
Estevez’s unforgivably padded screenplay takes an already loaded premise and packs it with noble speeches and clumsy dramatic digressions (the latter filled primarily by Taylor Schilling and Jena Malone, there to gaze admiringly at Stuart’s hard-bitten integrity). These add little to the plot or the underlying exhortation to see those forgotten by society. For good measure, Estevez throws in a couple of hiss-worthy villains—a vengeful prosecutor (Christian Slater at his most pencil-necked) and a vile reporter (Gabrielle Union)—trying to blow the protest into career advancement rather then just trying to figure out how to get the occupiers some warm beds for a few nights.
Although Estevez pulled together a surprisingly adept cast for this little indie movie, the real star of “The Public” is meant to be the library itself. Granted, it’s a 1950s-era brown brick Brutalist pile, whose atrium space doesn’t exactly lend itself to a soaring cinematic aria like Wim Wenders bestowed on the Berlin State Library for “Wings of Desire.” But as one of the only places in the city where the homeless can go to keep out of the cold, read a book without being hassled, and use a computer, the library is an accidental part of the social safety net.
Even with the library’s looming symbolic significance, there would have been room here for a neat little dark comedy about American indifference. Maybe something with a little Preston Sturges zip and zing that could have balanced out the ponderous nature of things like Stuart’s John Steinbeck recitation (“In the souls of the people, the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage”). There are hints here and there of that kind of sardonic humor, particularly when Bill responds to Stuart’s latest proclamation with a vintage Baldwin slash, “Your intellectual vanity really is breathtaking.”
But even though “The Public” ultimately doesn’t come together as a dramatic piece, particularly in the hammy climax, it does take some impressive chances. Just making a story about the invisible homeless is a brave move to start—audiences tend not to like stories about intractable issues, after all. Adding to that the lack of a savior narrative and the imposition of a massively clunky and square symbol at the heart of it all (there may as well be screen titles reading, “The library! Cornerstone of a literate democracy!”) and you have an unabashedly earnest piece of work for such a cynical time.[C+]