Hoffa.

In the newspaper ads for Hoffa, Jack Nicholson glowers out at us like a man with a particularly bad case of hemorrhoids nearing the end of a six-hour bus trip. And underneath his picture the advertising geniuses have written, "He did what he had to do." Who says there's no truth in advertising anymore? That caption perfectly encompasses the not quite breathtaking moral scope of David Mamet's script. From this movie you will learn that the world is a corrupt place and to get anything whatsoever accomplished you have to get your hands dirty and eventually you become corrupt yourself and the hypocritical world stomps you not to punish your corruption but to save its own virtuous face. That's exactly what happened to Jimmy Hoffa. The wheels of justice? Don't make me laugh. A pipsqueak only trying to prove himself to his older brother. Any more questions? No, of course not. Class dismissed. Thank you, Professor Mamet.

Of course, if the movie had some texture, some surprises in its storytelling or its style, there would be rewards for staying with it despite its paltry cynicism. But Mamet has only one surprise in store for us and I will now spring it on you.

The hero of Hoffa isn't Hoffa. The protagonist is a completely fictional character called Bobby Ciarro (played by director Danny DeVito), a truck driver befriended by the up-and-coming Teamster organizer. Ciarro becomes Hoffa's henchman and rises with his boss. And just in case we're such numbskulls who wouldn't know that the cronies of union bosses enjoy certain perks, Manet obligingly and boringly spends several minutes of this overlong movie showing us Bobby using his connections to evade speeding tickets, get access to gangster power brokers, and enjoy the company of high-priced call girls. What has happened to Mamet's sense of dramatic economy?

To be sure, there is a central idea to the Ciarro-Hoffa relationship. Hoffa's "befriending" of Bobby always manifests itself as damage. He wins Ciarro over to the union cause first by getting him fired from a desperately needed job and then by having him serve as replacement for a henchman who is accidently killed on a thuggish mission. You can see Mamet's intent: he is trying to portray Hoffa indirectly, through the ultimately pernicious effect he has on a Joe Average. By watching Bobby's corruption and destruction, we perceive Hoffa as a perilous master who blasts even as he befriends. But for this concept to work dramatically instead of remaining a mere concept, Mamet would have had to place the viewer very deep within Ciarro's perception of his friend and boss. And this he simply fails to do. Bobby trots through the movie, performing one errand after another. He's never a character, only a device to keep the plot in motion. DeVito's performance, though well balanced, both forceful and restrained, can't disguise the sheer functionality of his role.

Though he's not the protagonist, Hoffa necessarily has all the show-stopping public scenes in the movie: he bellows at picket lines, punches out company goons, defies Bobby Kennedy and Senate subcommittees. Jack Nicholson obviously realized that he was hired to do a star turn and he picks up his paycheck with honor. The actor has done his homework admirably: the stiff neck, the bantam strut, the slavically slitted eyes, the whine that is both self-pitying and menacing--the Hoffa carapace has been admirably assembled by this dynamic actor and he struts his stuff. I enjoyed this performance without taking any of it seriously for a second. It's a contraption, not a characterization.

In fact, the whole movie is a contraption that pretends to be a serious study of corruption. Big, baleful men in dark suits slip in and out of cars transporting suitcases filled with money, but where exactly does the money go? Into Hoffa's private pockets or into his union projects? At one point, a workers' recreation center is mentioned by Hoffa; the next second he sneers at the idea himself. So where does that leave us? This movie makes a show of getting at the human roots of mendacity, but its only real concern is with the flourishes and trappings of corruption.

DeVito's direction seems driven by sheer desperation: arty camera angles, tricky editing, meaningless use of slow-motion photography, inappropriately heartwarming music every time there's a melee (do DeVito and his composer think that a picket-line brawl expresses the heartland of America?). The movie is sometimes embarrassing even at the strictly technical level. Example: the convicted Hoffa is driven to jail in a police wagon on a highway lined with grateful Teamsters who cheer their fallen hero. The view of the crowd through the car's window is, of course, a traveling shot. But then we have a reverse angle of the smiling Hoffa acknowledging the cheers--and the car isn't in motion! Did everybody fall asleep in the editing room? When filmmakers nod off, why shouldn't the audience do the same?

GORDON D. MARINO is a visiting scholar in the department of philosophy and linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an assistant editor of Common Knowledge. He is currently finishing a book on Kierkegaard.