Super ‘Hero’
STRONG CAST, ENGROSSING STORY MAKE HBO ‘SHOW’ A WINNER
Acity is ripped apart when a federal judge mandates desegregation: HBO’s “Show Me a Hero” will resonate with Bostonians who remember the city’s turbulent experience with the forced busing of students in the ’70s.
But in this engrossing six-part miniseries debuting Sunday (two episodes for the next three weeks), the issue is housing, and it’s Yonkers, N.Y., in the crosshairs of a judge who will not tolerate the city’s foot-dragging and NIMBY attitude.
Academy Award-winning director Paul Haggis (“Crash”) and writer David Simon (“The Wire,” “Treme”) have gathered a fascinating cast — including Catherine Keener (“Capote”), Alfred Molina (“Love is Strange”), Winona Ryder (“The Age of Innocence”), Jon Bernthal (“The Walking Dead”) and more to re-create this truelife urban crisis based on the nonfiction book of the same name by former New York Times reporter Lisa Belkin.
Oscar Isaac stars as Nick Wasicsko, a naive freshman Yonkers councilman who, in 1987, is manipulated, too easily, into running against incumbent Mayor Angelo Martinelli (Jim Belushi, “According to Jim”). Nick leverages the city’s outrage over the federal order to add low-income housing to white neighborhoods to score an upset victory.
Nick becomes the youngest mayor in the country, but, in a classic example of “be careful what you wish for,” he realizes he must somehow enforce the order, now that U.S. District Judge Leonard Sand (Bob Balaban, “The Grand Budapest Hotel”) is threatening to jail him and his colleagues and impose fines that would bankrupt Yonkers.
Angry mobs turn out at every public hearing. “One wingnut away from a riot,” a councilman warns. Nick starts carrying a gun after a death threat. Mary Dorman (Keener), a longtime East Yonkers resident, is so angered by federal intrusion into her neighborhood that she becomes an unlikely activist, yet she has trouble reconciling some of her allies’ own racist, anti-Semitic views.
The black and Latino residents who might benefit from the plan seem uninterested or disheartened. “They don’t want to live with us, and why should we want to live with them?” one NAACP leader says.
Bernthal, who has spent much of his recent career playing men of action, has the best role of his career, and he shines as cocky but dedicated NAACP lawyer Michael Sussman, determined to make Yonkers integrate.
Ryder is very good as a councilwoman whose fate could serve as a warning to Nick, if only he were better at reading the signs. Why isn’t this actress working more?
Haggis, who directed all six hours, and Simon have walked this material before. Both in their most acclaimed works have chronicled how a city’s institutions can fail and cripple a people and unwittingly foster cycles of poverty, violence and injustice.
The locations change, the faces are different, but the aftermath remains just as devastating.