The new Frederick Wiseman film In Jackson Heights plants its audience in an American urban community's daily life, observing among other things a white, middle-aged, openly gay New York city councilman marching in the neighborhood's annual LGBT Freedom Day parade.
Taking on urban turf as vibrant and diverse as Jackson Heights, with its 167 different languages spoken and arguably the most inclusive group of ethnicities in America, presents a challenge even for a filmmaker as used to diverse subjects as the Boston-born, New England-educated Wiseman. Unlike the PBS-funded Frontline program, Wiseman's documentaries provide no "voice of God" narrator to tell us what to think about the soon-to-be "post-Obama" America, a country hurtling towards a most daunting national election.
It's no secret that Wiseman's unique methods often produce viewing that's a steep climb for even the most devoted information addicts in the PBS congregation. During In Jackson Heights, filmed with English, Spanish, Hindi and Arabic-language speakers (with English subtitles), we plunge into local disputes about zoning and urban planning that can induce dazed expressions even from multi-degreed experts. Wiseman's sense of a video democracy compels him to fix his camera eye on the face of a heavyset citizen as she weighs in on problems about which she is passionately engaged, but for which we have zero background information.
When he's not fixating on his never-stop-talking heads, Wiseman flashes around a 133-acre landscape (2013 population: 133,000 souls) that can hardly be called pretty. In his director's statement, Wiseman writes that he was looking for life as observed in "clothing stores, laundromats, bakeries, restaurants, mosques, temples, churches. The shooting method was to walk around filming sequences that together totaled 120 hours [with] no idea what [the finished film's] themes, point of view, or length would be."
The result is mother's milk to this New York-raised guy who, as a kid, binged on high-minded TV ranging from the Golden Age of video drama (Playhouse 90) to Edward R. Murrow-inspired documentaries on demagogues and persecuted farmworkers. Mind you, in the Murrow days, there was no "queer" content. Wiseman's work is a great measuring stick for just how much the agenda of the educated classes has expanded.
For me, In Jackson Heights is a revelation for its geography. In the 1960s, my Long Island Rail Road and New York subway trips around Gotham treated Jackson Heights as strictly "pass-through" turf that didn't merit a stopover except during the singular time when the announcer guy at Shea Stadium intoned that "your 1969 New York Mets" were World Champs.
Judged by the standards of Wiseman films, my favorite, 2011's Boxing Gym, is vastly more engaging, with its 90-minute spin around an Austin, Texas workout facility that welcomed men, women and kids to strap on the gloves. Boxing Gym is alive not only with the sounds of gloves hitting flesh, but also with short, punchy chats that are illuminating, gossipy and very entertaining. For viewers looking for a more arresting peek at New Yorkers as a species, I'd recommend William Friedkin's great narco-cop drama The French Connection, with Gene Hackman's Popeye Doyle chasing drug-smugglers �" or any episode of Seinfeld .
In Jackson Heights is relentlessly high-minded and politically correct to the nines. But entertainment is to be found, as it was when I was a New York kid, by following the signs flashing "to the City," meaning Manhattan. Opens Friday.