City Hall

After a brief visit to a Boston city government call center, the documentary City Hall rushes directly to its sweet spot — an extended Powerpoint budget presentation. Over the next 4 1/2 hours, veteran filmmaker Frederick Wiseman lingers through dozens of such meetings, hearings, community forums, speeches, and random encounters with Boston city workers. The doc was shot from October 2018 into early 2019 — a fact revealed only because a planning session for the Red Sox World Series parade is one scintillating sequence — and it portrays countless aspects of municipal government.

It is indeed a massive document, but whether it’s a documentary is open to question. Not a single person is identified. You’ll eventually figure out that the earnest, likable guy who keeps reappearing is Mayor Marty Walsh, but not one committee or speaker or event is named or put into context. Shots of building signs sometimes reveal locations, but not always. There’s no narration, no original interviews, no followup for any of the myriad issues raised. It’s just on to the next — forget about that last scene; it’ll never come up again. There are several hundred shots of random Boston buildings, with an emphasis on dilapidated homes and quirky small businesses, typically without any visible humans. These real estate montages, apropos of nothing, separate the extended visits to committee rooms and cramped offices.

Countless city residents are seen at hearings — again, unidentified — but only a few are actually permitted to share snippets of their lives. A couple characters spin stories about why they shouldn’t pay parking tickets, some dog owners are seen in a pointless drop-by at an animal shelter, and one sad retiree explaining his apartment’s rat infestation to a city worker (job unknown). That’s about it.

Mostly, City Hall is 275 minutes of talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, a lot of it in impenetrable bureaucrat-speak or empty public relations mode. If the idea was to relate how dull the grind of city governance can be, it’s well done. But there’s no sense of a filmmaker’s point of view, no thread of narrative, and very little actual information. It’s like being stuck in an endless Zoom meeting to which you wish you had not been invited.

Wiseman is a highly respected filmmaker with a long resume, and an assortment of critics have found City Hall to be a captivating accomplishment. (It’s got a 100 percent “Fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes.) Apparently this kind of unfiltered eavesdropping is Wiseman’s signature. But when a film’s most exciting sequence is watching trash collectors feeding mattresses and an abandoned barbecue grill into the voracious compactor on the back of a garbage truck, you might want to opt for some community access cable TV show instead. The aesthetic is similar, but at least you would know who’s talking.

Grade: F. Not rated, but suitable to bore viewers of all ages. Available to rent via grailmoviehouse.com

(Photo: Zipporah Films)