After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani became an international hero. But before his sudden deification, he was a much-maligned and often confrontational political figure who, by the end of his two terms, was despised by a majority of New Yorkers. "Giuliani Time" (2006), a new documentary from former cinematographer Kevin Keating, effectively details the numerous controversies that plagued America's Mayor throughout his tumultuous reign. Through interviews with both friends and foes the latter seem to outweigh the former Keating weaves a telling, though sometimes long-winded tale that paints Rudy as a controlling autocrat whose hell-bent quest for a more orderly city often trampled the rights of its citizens.
"Giuliani Time" starts with Rudy's rapid rise from working-class Brooklyn to becoming an ambitious U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York, where he made a name for himself going after mobsters and crooked politicians. Once Reagan was ushered into office, Giuliani become Associate Attorney General, the third-highest office inside the Justice Department. As a harbinger of things to come, he sought to deny the rights of Haitian immigrants fleeing from the political repression of Jean-Claude Duvalier. After meeting personally with Duvalier, Giuliani misleadingly testified that the alleged repression did not exist. Keating focuses on this as a seminal moment in Giuliani's career, one that foretells his crackdown on New Yorkers when he becomes mayor in 1994.
Following a bitter rematch against former mayor David Dinkins, Giuliani barely nudged his way into office on a promise to fight crime by fixing broken windows, a zero tolerance policing policy that focuses on quelling public nuisances in order to prevent major crimes. Keating delves deeply into Giuliani's use of the broken windows theory to tighten his grip on the city, first by removing the homeless and the dreaded squeegee men from the streets, then by cutting welfare rolls while using the unemployed to sweep sidewalks and take out trash. He also details Giuliani's unleashing of the police to do whatever necessary to enforce the law, which ultimately led to numerous accusations of brutality, and two highly-publicized cases where one man was brutally sodomized with a plunger handle and another shot forty-one times while unarmed.
Keating does a nice job going step-by-step through Giuliani's troubled tenure, thankfully keeping mentions of 9/11 only at the beginning and end. Clocking in at close to 120 minutes, "Giuliani Time" does get carried away from time to time, going off on excursions that occasionally stray too far from the subject, while the most interesting aspect of the Giuliani story his public meltdown in 2000 while running for a U.S. Senate seat against Hillary Clinton gets the short shrift. But in the end, what we get is a fascinating portrait of a man who overstepped his bounds in his quest for power and seemingly lost everything, only to be reborn in our nation's most tragic moment.
By Shawn Dwyer a CinemActivist
