Wiseman's four-and-a-half hour documentary stars Boston mayor Marty Walsh in its fly-on-the-wall examination of a city government. Walsh is everywhere until the close to the end, where he is absent at a community meeting with the residents of Dorchester, a community mostly of color, as they pepper the Asian owners who want to establish a cannabis dispensary in the neighborhood with questions about their plans, motivations and attitudes, though there is a representative of the mayor's office who makes dubious promises that everything will be fine. There is no doubt throughout that Walsh is trying to run an inclusive and diverse City Hall, not an easy thing in a city with a history of Irish immigrants in power. We see lots of meetings in which Wiseman lets the camera run while various board members drone on at length about items such as how to increase the student body of an already overcrowded school, interrupted by "pillow shots," non-narrative shots of houses, buildings and piers in Boston.
Wiseman's style certainly has its problems -- he never identifies who is speaking, though he does often establish where a particular meeting is taking place -- but his quiet and contemplative style lets things and people speak for themselves, certainly a relief after the pompous know-it-all attitude of Ken Burns's approach and the cheesy re-creations of many Netflix documentaries.
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