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| Rudy-Mania! | |||||||
| A made-for-television movie on Sunday gets a lot wrong. Here’s a cheat sheet | |||||||
| March 26 — I have no idea why you would want to spend 90 minutes this coming Sunday in pursuit of a greater understanding of the twisted inner workings and horrific hair of Rudy Giuliani—but if you do choose to watch USA Network’s badly titled “Rudy: The Rudy Giuliani Story,” you not only need professional help, but you need my help. |
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TRUE, NO ADVANCE information will fully prepare you for Rudy’s hair, but you’ll need some help in decoding this movie, most of which will be incomprehensible to anyone except New Yorkers with subscriptions to the city’s three daily papers and an addiction to our 24-hour local news station, NY1. By the way, that would make you a loser. But you’re not a loser if you have trouble reconciling the complexities of the man who was three months shy of being tossed into the dustbin of history when the terror attacks of September 11 turned him into “America’s Mayor.” Complexities? Well, here was a man who browbeat his aides relentlessly yet earned the passionate devotion of those very same aides—many of whom still work with him today. Here was a man who said he believed in the law above all else—yet spent most of his eight years in office waging losing court battles against homeless advocates, AIDS patients, artists and civil-rights demonstrators. Here was a man who took an oath to uphold democracy—yet argued that the best way to preserve democracy was to delay an election so he could remain in office for a few more months. Here was a man who said he loved New York, but waged a highly public war against jaywalkers. No wonder the USA movie can’t seem to figure out whether to bury Rudy or to praise him. It starts in the very first scene of the movie, where a somber Rudy—played to follicular precision by James Woods—is being driven in his ubiquitous white sport-ute (nicknamed “the ice cream truck” by New York reporters) on the evening of Sept. 10, 2001. At that naive time, Sept. 10 was merely the day before the primary election that would determine which candidates would compete to succeed Giuliani. So in the car, the term-limited mayor gives in to a little self-pity, first joking about his peculiar living arrangement (at the time, the mayor—separated from his wife—was living with a gay couple and their Shih Tzu, Bonnie). Later, he tells his driver that he’d be lucky if a handful of New Yorkers would remember him as a guy who “cleaned up the city a little, maybe.” Wrong! Rudy Giuliani never gave in to self-pity. He would sooner sue a homeless person than give in to the particular neurosis of weaker souls—self-doubt. The movie then unfolds through flashbacks that are interspersed with a harrowing re-creation of the 9-11 attack, scenes that present Rudy as doing everything from plotting retaliatory strategy to comforting individual widows. He’s Caesar in a combover; part worrier, part warrior. The first flashback takes Rudy back to his salad days (and when I say “salad days,” I am, of course, talking about his hairstyle) as Ronald Reagan’s U.S. Attorney in Miami. If we are to believe “Rudy,” this was a heady time for our hero, who, thanks to Reagan’s hypocritical approach to Haitian and Cuban refugees, could deport wave after wave of poor Haitians while permitting thousands of politically oppressed Cubans to get instant citizenship. And where is Rudy forced to defend this tough-to-defend policy? Why, in a hard-hitting interview with none other than his future wife, Miami television “personality,” Donna Hanover. Wrong! If I told you that “2 + 2 = lemon,” I would be closer to telling the truth than if I told you that Donna Hanover—actress, TV news reporter and future Food Network “star”—is capable of grilling anything except a piece of boneless chicken (and she might even botch that, too). The toughest question she ever fired was when she asked some chef if it’s possible to substitute margarine for butter in a fancy French recipe. Yet here she is, going after Giuliani for defending Reagan’s policies in court. And then, despite her obvious disgust with the man’s politics, she accepts when he asks her out to dinner, takes his hand as they walk along the beach after eating and actually initiates a kiss when he explains why he switched from the Democratic Party to the GOP. “Democrats always talked of things getting better,” he says. “Republicans did whatever they could to make them better.” And she kisses him! If I thought that line could’ve possibly worked, I would’ve worked on Reagan’s re-election campaign in 1984 instead of chanting “U.S. Out of Grenada!” on the college green. In reality, Rudy and Donna met on a blind date at Joe’s Stone Crab House in Miami Beach. There are no reports that his party switch was the key romantic ploy that finally got Hanover in the sack, no evidence that they strolled barefoot on the beach. In fact, given Rudy’s generally sickly pallor, there’s no evidence that he ever walked a beach—except, perhaps, the third fairway at Dyker Beach, a public course where he indulged his passion for golf. After that, the movie uses dramatic license like a 14-year-old kid uses a fake ID. In one scene, we see Rudy take over the U.S. Attorney’s office in New York—and promptly fire one of the “lazy, prima donna” assistant U.S. attorneys for catching a few winks during a pep talk so loud, he should have been fired for dying on the job, not sleeping on it. The next scene shows Rudy—dressed, inexplicably, like Sylvester Stallone in the original “Rocky”—out for a jog with his boyhood friend and confidant Peter Powers. The two discuss mob control of the city’s construction business (finally, an accuracy!), and Rudy is shown jogging over to a mob captain and introducing himself as the man who is going to “put you out of business.” “By the way,” he says, jogging off, “tell Fat Tony I say hi.” Rudy Giuliani running? The only running he ever did was for toward a bank of microphones. But jogging? No. This guy couldn’t even be bothered to jog the part of his memory where his marriage vows were stored. Of course, there is one stunningly accurate scene in this portion of the movie. Obsessed with nailing the mob, Rudy spends all night reading up on Mafia tactics. One night, Donna saunters into his office in a low-cut negligee and bids her husband to put down Joe Bonanno’s autobiography and come to bed. Nothing against the always stunning Penelope Ann Miller, but the sight of Donna Hanover in a negligee would scarcely lure a death-row prisoner on his last night on the planet into the sack. Flash forward a few more years and we see a chunky man named Ray negotiating to give the Liberal Party endorsement to Rudy, despite the fact that he was running his first campaign for mayor as a Republican. The scene is riddled with inaccuracies—since when has abortion policy played any role in a New York City mayoral election?—but none more glaring than the fact that actor Vlasta Vrana is far too thin to accurately portray the billowing mass of Raymond Harding, a man who cared a lot more about patronage jobs than petty things like political positions anyway. After that, we get a barrage of disjointed scenes: Rudy goes ballistic on a man washing the windshield of his car—a portent of his subsequent crusade against the “squeegee men” who used to demand money to “clean” the windshields of terrified drivers at key intersections all over town; Rudy leading a police rally on the steps of City Hall—the very same steps that he declared off-limits to protestors when he became mayor; Rudy trying to sleep—alone—in the Gracie Mansion basement while Donna loudly gallops on a StairMaster (her alleged abandonment of him during his prostate-cancer treatments later became an issue in their separation); Rudy—again alone—eating dinner and smoking a cigar in the back room of a restaurant (it’s not that he had alienated everyone in his inner circle, but the back room was the only place he could legally smoke because he had outlawed smoking in restaurants). From that point, the movie speeds to its conclusion. Isolated, lonely and term-limited, it looks as though nothing can save Rudy and his legacy. Then September 11 happened. Yet even though Rudy’s ultimate resuscitation is the premise of “Rudy,” the movie totally ignores the genuine eloquence and tirelessness that Giuliani showed in those dark days, mistakenly attributing his revival to the fact that he attended more than 150 funerals. It’s the last of 90 minutes of missed opportunities. Gersh Kuntzman is also a columnist for The New York Post. His Web site is at http://www.gersh.tv © 2003 Newsweek, Inc. | ||||||||||||
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