Taking a hands-off approach but still managing to treat the issue as farce, Benjamin Rosen and Jevon Roush’s “A Stadium Story” tells of the fight over the proposed Jets football stadium and New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s desperate bid to bring the Olympics to Manhattan. Arthouse play and TV exposure seem assured, especially given the stylishness of the production and the all-too-candid portrait of politicians behaving at their worst.
Ostensibly picking no sides in what turned out to be a face-off between labor unions and residents of what would have been a transformed West Side, the directors leave a few grimy stones unturned in their effort to be objective — Bloomberg’s well-known friendship with Jets president Jay Cross, for instance, or the home addresses of most of those protesting construction workers, few of whom were likely to be neighbors of the protesting Westsiders. Doc is a good explanation, though, for why it’s so hard to build a consensus, or a building, in today’s political climate.
