'Show Me a Hero': David Simon's Heroic New Drama
From The Wire to Treme, David Simon has given us bold dramatizations of societal shifts, of public-policy debate worked into rich portrayals of three-dimensional characters under duress. In this sense, Show Me a Hero is in keeping with Simon’s earlier work.
The six-part series, premiering on HBO Sunday night, details efforts to build 200 units of court-ordered public housing in white neighborhoods of Yonkers, New York, in the late 1980s. Just writing that sentence made my fingers a little numb, which is why I was never a political reporter. But writer-producer Simon, working with co-writer William F. Zorzi is adapting Lisa Belkin’s book of the same name, makes Show Me a Hero so lively a look at mid-level local politics, you end up feeling moved and virtuous at the same time.
Hero’s protagonist is no one’s idea of a hero: Nick Wasicsko, the Yonkers City Council member who, at age 28, became the youngest big-city mayor in the country 1987-89. Wasicsko, played by Oscar Isaac (Inside Llewyn Davis), is a runty little loud-mouth, ambitious and charming whenever he’s not pushy and insufferable. It’s easy to see why first Belkin, and then Simon, constructed this story around him — he’s a colorful real-life character who effected change and then saw that change irrevocably alter his life in ways he could never have imagined.
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As directed by Paul Haggis (Crash), Hero shifts between a few crucial subplots. There’s the governmental maneuverings — many white Yonkers residents didn’t want public housing built because it would be occupied by black residents who, whites felt, would lower their property values and bring crime to the area. There’s the race and class analysis of this drama — the portrayal of a wide array of black lives that were affected, for good and ill, by the public housing debate. And there’s the story of Wasicsko himself, his ambition and drive leading him to make a few bravely independent decisions and a number of selfish, petty ones. If, like me, you didn’t know Wasicsko’s story, you may be surprised by its conclusion, although the F. Scott Fitzgerald quote that gives the production its title — “Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy” — is an obvious clue.
The cast here is exceptional. In addition to Isaac’s mesmerizing performance, Alfred Molina is a terrific showboater as a toothpick-chewing councilman, LaTanya Richardson Jackson is moving as a woman with fading eyesight for whom public housing could be literally life-saving, and Winona Ryder makes a big impression in a small role as a savvy political pro. This is, indeed, a TV-movie stuffed with many exceptional actors doing wonderful work.
There are times when the pace of Show Me a Hero becomes predictably metronomic. We come to sense that a scene of political office scheming will be followed by a poignant one of people who are suffering in poverty; if anything prevents viewers from sticking with Hero, it will be the relentlessness of this pacing. But I was completely drawn into Show Me a Hero. That same relentlessness gives it a tension and drive that makes you want to follow its true story all the way to its end in 1994, and to realize as you watch that what happened in Yonkers has reverberations that are still being felt in other cities now, in Ferguson, Baltimore, Charleston, and other major urban areas where politics and race play out their pitiless scenarios.
Show Me a Hero premieres Sunday, Aug. 16 at 8 p.m. on HBO.
