MAD CITY (51)

Directed by: Costa-Gavras

Starring: Dustin Hoffman, John Travolta, Alan Alda, Mia Kirshner

The Pitch: A news reporter looking for a big story happens to be in the right place when a gunman takes hostages - including a bunch of visiting schoolkids - at the Natural History Museum.

Theo Sez: "This is America," intones a cabbie, justifying our hero's actions ; "it can make you crazy" - which pretty much sums up this thought-provoking but too-didactic drama. The title is presumably as in world-gone-mad, though it could also echo Peter Finch's famous rallying-cry ("mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore") in NETWORK - if only because, like that film, this is based on the proposition that television news reporting is a breeding-ground for unethical vultures. Gavras treats this fairly unsurprising theme the way he used to treat political assassinations in his 70s thrillers - as the cue for a complicated pile-up of ideas, adding up not, in this case, to a conspiracy theory but to a tract on the State of the Nation : an American eagle is prominently on display inside the museum, even as a chaotic media circus - right-wing militias, hippie folk-singers, religious nuts - gathers outside, and the film fairly batters us with evidence that television is a Bad Thing, right from the opening shots of something black and metallic being assembled, looking like a gun but turning out to be a TV camera (lethal weapon, geddit?). So many points are made that some are bound to be intelligent - notably that objective, "balanced" reporting can, in giving every angle equal prominence, obscure the truth as surely as the crassest propaganda - but it's a clumsy sort of film, full of cumbersome exposition (how do you give the audience information about our hero's past? have him soliloquise at a urinal) and messily-structured in its later stages, with too many inconsequential scenes (Travolta telling the kids a story is the biggest head-scratcher). Still, it obviously means well - its indignation is real, its heart in the right place, its view of people sympathetic and compassionate ; it's not quite enough but hey, it's something.