Hoffa

A film about Jimmy Hoffa already has a leg-up on other films because its subject is so damn interesting. It’s a pity that Hoffa doesn’t bother with examining the man, instead preferring to stare up at him in awe, viewed through the eyes of someone else, with no insight or depth brought to the main character.

Yet this lack of insight into Hoffa’s reasoning or feelings behind his actions doesn’t come close to being the main problem with this film. The biggest problem with Hoffa is that it is quite simply imminently forgettable. For all of its lavish period details and ambitions of epic scope and scale, Hoffa does not bother with critical thinking about its subject matter, never mines much depth of the rich dramatic ground it covers. And it places Hoffa in a secondary role to Danny DeVito’s best friend, who just so happens to be present at every important event.

One cannot fault DeVito’s eye as a director, for much of the film looks handsome, but one does wish that he had taken a point-of-view about this material and gone with that. Luckily, he has Nicholson in the titular role, trying valiantly to spin straw into gold. Normally the marriage of Nicholson and David Mamet would excite me, but between this and The Postman Always Rings Twice, I’m left wondering why they seem to cancel each other out. Mamet’s script needed a more clear vision, why is he telling the story of this man? What insights can he bring us about his journey? Hoffa, like many biopics before and since, is too scattershot, too eager to hit the big events of this person’s life, preferring to take a controversial figure and change their lives into a greatest hits package, and nothing more.