Mad City (1997)

A Hostage Crisis Made for Television

Mad City is about how television news turns a human disaster into a story, and how the story takes on a life of its own. Its hostage-taker isn’t a criminal mastermind or a terrorist. He’s a confused, frightened, laid-off security guard who didn’t plan any of it, and the film’s point is that the cameras decide who he’s long before he has a chance to decide for himself.

Costa-Gavras, the Greek-French director of Z and Missing, made it for Warner Bros. in 1997, from a script by Tom Matthews. It flopped badly at the box office and received mixed reviews, and it has been largely forgotten. My rating is a 7. It’s heavy-handed in places, and its anger at the media now looks prophetic. It’s a better film than its reputation suggests, and more relevant today than when it was released.

Max Brackett

Dustin Hoffman plays Max Brackett, a once-prominent network reporter exiled to a small-town station in California after an on-air clash with the network’s star anchor. He’s bitter, clever, cynical and desperate for a way back to the big time. When he’s sent to a local museum to do a dull story about budget cuts, he’s in the ladies’ bathroom when the trouble starts.

Hoffman gives Max a fast, nervous, calculating energy. He sees the hostage crisis the way a gambler sees a winning hand, and he starts broadcasting from inside the museum within minutes, feeding the story to his station and then to the network. He’s not a villain, exactly. He’s a man who has spent his career learning how to shape reality for an audience, and he can’t stop.

As the film goes on, Max begins to care about the man he’s using, and his conscience becomes the story’s emotional thread. Hoffman plays the change subtly, through hesitations and small kindnesses, and it’s among his more interesting later performances. He never asks for sympathy, and he earns some anyway.

Sam Baily

John Travolta plays Sam Baily, a former security guard at the Madeline Museum of Natural History who has lost his job to budget cuts. He comes back to the museum with a shotgun and a bag of dynamite, not to hurt anyone, but to make the museum’s director listen to him. He wants his job back, and he has no idea what he’s doing. He hasn’t thought past the first conversation.

Things go wrong almost immediately. The gun goes off by accident, wounding a fellow guard, and a class of children on a field trip is trapped inside with Sam. Suddenly he’s a hostage-taker, surrounded by police, and he’s terrified. Travolta plays Sam as a simple, decent, not very bright man who is in completely over his head, and the performance is sympathetic and sad.

Sam is the kind of character who would never make the news under ordinary circumstances. That’s exactly why the cameras love him. He’s ordinary, relatable and unpredictable, and to a television producer that combination is gold. Every viewer can imagine being in his shoes, and every network wants to be the one showing his face.

The Story Takes Over

Once Max realizes what’s happening, he coaches Sam on how to present himself to the public. He tells him what to say, how to look and how to win sympathy, and for a while it works. Sam becomes a folk hero, a working man pushed too far, and viewers across the country begin rooting for him. Crowds gather outside the museum, and the story leads every bulletin.

Then the network arrives. Max’s old rival, the star anchor Kevin Hollander, played by Alan Alda, flies in to take over the coverage, and the story shifts. The guard Sam wounded dies. Polls, pundits and interviews turn Sam from a sympathetic victim into a dangerous madman, and the public turns with them. The facts haven’t changed. Only the framing has, and the framing is all anyone watching at home will ever see.

This is the film’s sharpest point. Neither Sam nor Max controls the story. It belongs to the networks, the ratings and the audience, and it goes wherever they want it to go. By the time either man understands what’s happening, the story has already decided how it will end.

Two Stars in a Museum

At its center is the relationship between Max and Sam, played out in the museum’s corridors and offices while the cameras wait outside. Hoffman is quick, restless and manipulative. Travolta is slow, anxious and trusting. Their scenes together have a strange intimacy, two men from different worlds who need each other for very different reasons.

Sam comes to rely on Max as his only friend and adviser, and Max comes to feel responsible for him. Mad City is strongest in these quiet exchanges, away from the noise of the coverage, when the two men talk about work, family and what went wrong. It’s here that the story’s human cost becomes clear, and it’s what makes the ending hurt.

Alan Alda’s Anchor

Alda plays Hollander as a smooth, smiling, utterly ruthless network star who cares only about the ratings and his own position. He’s the perfect embodiment of the film’s target: polished, authoritative and completely indifferent to the people whose lives he’s covering. His warmth on camera switches off the moment the red light goes out.

The rivalry between Hollander and Max, rooted in the on-air humiliation that ended Max’s network career, gives the film some of its best scenes, as two men who know exactly how television works fight over control of the story. Alda is excellent, all polished, genial charm on the surface and cold calculation beneath. Their final exchanges carry the weight of a long professional grudge.

Laurie

Mia Kirshner plays Laurie, a young intern who works with Max at the local station and begins as his eager assistant. As the story grows, she discovers her own ambition, and by the end she has learned everything Max taught her about using a story to advance a career, and has left his scruples behind.

Her arc is a quieter, bleaker version of the film’s argument, told in glances and small decisions. Max, at least, discovers a conscience. Laurie discovers a career. She’s the next generation of television journalism, and the film suggests she’ll be even more ruthless than the people she learned from. It’s the film’s most chilling idea, delivered almost in passing.

Costa-Gavras

Costa-Gavras made his name with political thrillers about real injustice, including Z, about the assassination of a Greek politician, and Missing, about an American journalist who disappeared in Chile. Mad City is lighter in tone and set in a small American town, and it shares his interest in how power shapes the truth. Here the power belongs to television, and truth becomes whatever holds an audience.

His direction is efficient, and he handles the crowds, the cameras and the claustrophobic interiors of the museum well. His touch is sometimes heavy, and the satire can be obvious, with characters explaining the film’s points about the media in speeches. The film’s anger is sincere, and it sometimes overwhelms its subtlety. A lighter touch would have let the audience reach its conclusions on their own.

The Cameras Keep Rolling

The standoff ends in tragedy. Sam, abandoned by public opinion, facing prison and utterly lost, releases the hostages and then ends the siege by setting off his explosives inside the museum, killing himself. Max, who has come to care about him, stumbles out of the smoke into a wall of cameras and microphones.

The reporters surround him, shouting questions, and Max, in a moment of despair and fury, tells them that they killed Sam, that the media, including himself, destroyed a harmless man by turning him into a story. The reporters keep filming. It’s a bleak, angry ending, and the final image of the cameras swarming around a grieving man is the film’s sharpest image of what it’s criticising.

The ending is heavy-handed, and it’s powerful. The film has been building to it from the first scene, and every step of the coverage has pushed Sam closer to it. Hoffman’s anguish in the final moments is raw and convincing, and it leaves the audience with nowhere comfortable to stand.

More Relevant Now Than in 1997

When Mad City was released in 1997, its portrait of the media seemed exaggerated to many critics. Twenty-four-hour cable news was still young, the internet was in its infancy and social media didn’t exist. The idea that a story could be shaped, reshaped and weaponised by coverage felt like satire, and several reviewers dismissed the film as paranoid.

Today it feels like a documentary. The speed with which public opinion turns on Sam, the power of framing over facts and the way a person becomes a character in someone else’s story are now everyday features of news and social media. The film was ahead of its time, and it deserves to be rediscovered.

Watched now, the scenes of pundits debating Sam’s character, of polls measuring his popularity by the hour and of a network rushing to own the narrative feel uncomfortably familiar. The only thing missing is a smartphone in every hand, and the film’s logic would fit that world without changing a line.

Too Loud by Half

The film is often too obvious, with characters explaining its message instead of letting it emerge. Some supporting characters are thin, the middle section drags, and Travolta’s Sam, sympathetic as he is, can seem implausibly naive. The satire lacks the wit of the best media films, like Network or Broadcast News. It knows what it wants to say, and it says it a little too loudly.

It earns a 7. Watch it for Hoffman and Travolta, for Alan Alda’s chilling anchor and for a story about media manipulation that has only become more relevant. It’s flawed and preachy in places, and it’s worth seeing. Few films of the nineties saw the future of news so clearly.

Craft Note

The Verdict on Mad City

It’s a 7, a flawed but increasingly relevant satire of television news, with strong performances from Dustin Hoffman, John Travolta and Alan Alda. Its prophetic view of how the media builds and destroys people is worth the heavy hand.

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