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Essay on Comparison Of "Hoffa" The Motion Picture To Actual Historical Data
Danny DeVito's film 'Hoffa' totally distorts and whitewashes Hoffa's crime-ridden past. It was originally proposed by Hoffa cronies Frank Ragano, Brett O'Brien and Joseph Isgro. David Mamet's screenplay shamelessly lionizes Hoffa in many unrealistic ways.
Jimmy Hoffa was the most famous American labor leader of the late 1950s and 1960s. Until now, as his biographer Arthur A. Sloane notes, he has been remembered chiefly as a hoodlum, in a string of tasteless jokes. (Sloane 128)
There are jokes about his disappearance and presumed murder by the mob in 1975, and jokes about his thuggish reputation and the violence of the union he commanded.
Danny DeVito's film Hoffa reworks the man's life into a mythic tragedy, into a story of a heroic, embattled champion of the working class who made, by force of circumstance, a Faustian pact with the underworld.
The movie's reception has been generally admiring: strong notices, top-ten lists, a Golden Globe nomination for Jack Nicholson, its leading man. There has also been generous behindthe-scenes coverage about how the filmmaker and David Mamet, the screenwriter, resurrected the union leader and his rough-and-tumble world.
But Hoffa is not the dramatized biography that it purports to be. There are, in fact, three distinct stories that need to be told about the film: the story of Hoffa and how it was made, the story that Hoffa tells, and the story of Jimmy Hoffa. In each of these stories, people deal in elusive distinctions between fact and fantasy; and each of them shows legitimate business machinations getting caught up in heedless ambition and a disregard for the truth. Placed side by side, the stories indicate just how corrupt and fraudulent this exculpatory movie really is.
The first story, the story of Hoffa, mainly concerns the movie's troubled origins. Most critics, and certainly most moviegoers, must....
