The time is the present. The place is Cincinnati. The city is in the middle of a frigid winter of record-setting low temperatures. A group of sixty homeless men are so desperate for shelter that they decide to hold a demonstration and stay overnight on the third floor of the downtown Cincinnati Public Library. This film is their story.
"The Public" had good intentions in depicting the realities of the homeless in America. Many of the men were recovering vets. Several were struggling with mental disease. Others were simply broke. An opioid victim was the son of the police detective in charge of ending the standoff in the library. The villain of the film is a mean-spirited and self-service district attorney running for mayor, who has no sympathy for the homeless.
As the film progressed, it struggled to make credible why there would be a police brigade preparing to rush the library and arrest the homeless men. The detective in charge of the operation (Alec Baldwin) was an especially unconvincing character because he was supposed to be a negotiator, but he did no bargaining with the men inside. A cliché newscaster intentionally distorts the situation for the public in order to raise her network's ratings.
The most moving part of the film was when the protagonist, an unassuming library supervisor, reads aloud to the news reporter a passage from John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath," connecting the misery of the Great Depression of the 1930s to the homeless condition afflicting thousands in the twenty-first century.
It was said in the film that a library is "the last bastion of a true democracy." Those noble words are meaningful. But the film was unsuccessful in delivering a pragmatic message about how to effectively solve a social ill that is not being addressed in large American cities today.
"The Public" had good intentions in depicting the realities of the homeless in America. Many of the men were recovering vets. Several were struggling with mental disease. Others were simply broke. An opioid victim was the son of the police detective in charge of ending the standoff in the library. The villain of the film is a mean-spirited and self-service district attorney running for mayor, who has no sympathy for the homeless.
As the film progressed, it struggled to make credible why there would be a police brigade preparing to rush the library and arrest the homeless men. The detective in charge of the operation (Alec Baldwin) was an especially unconvincing character because he was supposed to be a negotiator, but he did no bargaining with the men inside. A cliché newscaster intentionally distorts the situation for the public in order to raise her network's ratings.
The most moving part of the film was when the protagonist, an unassuming library supervisor, reads aloud to the news reporter a passage from John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath," connecting the misery of the Great Depression of the 1930s to the homeless condition afflicting thousands in the twenty-first century.
It was said in the film that a library is "the last bastion of a true democracy." Those noble words are meaningful. But the film was unsuccessful in delivering a pragmatic message about how to effectively solve a social ill that is not being addressed in large American cities today.