Those were the days

A scene from Buddy, a feature documentary about former Providence Mayor Vincent A. Cianci Jr., directed by Cherry Arnold.

More than a year and a half after its August 2005 debut at the Rhode Island International Film Festival, and after piling up awards at film festivals from Boston to Woods Hole, filmmaker Cherry Arnold s Buddy finally makes its commercial theatrical debut this weekend in Providence and Warwick.
If a number of sold-out screenings in limited presentations since 2005 is any indication, Arnold s documentary, about the rise and fall of the political fortunes of former Providence Mayor Vincent A. Cianci Jr.

, may be THE FILM everyone in Rhode Island will want to see this weekend.
It s an impressive and exhaustively detailed film that gives us Cianci s public persona, from his first capture of City Hall in 1974, squeaking into office as the anti-corruption candidate, to his downfall in 2002 when he was convicted of criminal conspiracy.
Yet watching it, I had the creeping feeling that, like Buddy Cianci, its time may have passed.

It s an invaluable historical record, a time capsule look really, at how a very talented, very bright, mesmerizingly personable man could, Pied Piper-like, capture the hearts of a city and give its residents a renewed sense of their worth. Yet in Buddy s absence, Providence has moved on.
I had wondered, a few days before seeing Arnold s film, what Buddy Cianci will think of the city he loved when he is released from prison in a few months.

It has been less than five years since he went away and yet there have been so many changes in the skyline and neighborhoods of Providence that he may be startled to find that the city has grown and moved on without him. Buddy and Cianci seem like pages from a past that, in some ways, seems like only yesterday, but in others seems quaintly last century. The 20th century?

Buddy makes it seem that the city s political system spent that century still firmly rooted in the 19th, with its favors and political machines in full sway, democracy be damned.
Arnold has effectively used newsreel footage to bring back the political highs and lows of Cianci s reign, plus commentary by political insiders and reporters to explain what we re seeing and what went wrong in the end. It s well researched, but sometimes dry.

Remarkably, Arnold, who was given access to Cianci and followed him around with her camera during his final year in office, manages to give a balanced account. Buddy is a film where both the people who love him, and those who loathe him, will find something to like. Arnold presents both sides of the man and allows the audience to make up its own mind.

This is just what a documentary should do. Yet in the wake of Michael Moore, who added a heavy touch of theatricality to documentaries, Buddy seems rather just-the-facts solid.
It comes to vibrant life, however, whenever the photogenic Cianci pops onto the screen.

He was the only politician, Arnold Schwarzenegger said during a visit to Providence to promote physical fitness in the Buddy era, who wore pancake makeup in the daytime. Cianci was always camera ready.
There he is, bounding out of his limousine to schmooze at an art gallery opening, to glad hand a crowd at a picnic, to march in a parade.

He was his own one-man trumpets-blowing, flag-waving parade. Whispers among an expectant crowd that The mayor has arrived! would stir excitement.

There was always the spark of showbiz about him. One of the most telling images in Buddy is of him as a child, all dressed up and ready to perform in front of a radio microphone on a weekly talent program. It was a spotlight Cianci would covet all his life.

Later, after he had been convicted of assaulting his recently divorced wife s alleged lover at his East Side home and was forced to resign from office, Cianci carried the spotlight with him. He took to the airwaves as a savvy and highly successful political talk show host for several years on WPRO. He returned there a decade later, broadcasting in the months before he had to report to the federal correctional facility in New Jersey.

It s the ups and downs of his political career, with those downs often created by Cianci himself, that make Buddy so fascinating and make his life what some have called a Greek tragedy, or at least the stuff of grand Italian opera. For whenever he seemed about to pull himself out of some political crisis unscathed, he would shoot himself in the foot, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. This all comes into focus in the final 15 (and most interesting) minutes of Buddy, as his career unravels.

One of the images you may carry away from Buddy, even though it is not on screen, is the one conjured up by former Cianci staffer Paul Campbell, who tells of spotting Cianci one Friday night shortly before the fallen mayor was sent off to serve his 64-month sentence, sitting alone at a table in a small pub, scribbling something on a piece of paper, perhaps contemplating his future. It s an image of Cianci, alone and sad, that begs sympathy for the man who is described earlier on screen by philanthropist Alan Shawn Feinstein as the only man who had a city as his mistress.
Although the federal judge who sentenced him pointed out that there is a good Buddy and a bad Buddy, terms others use to describe the mayor s mercurial personality, we see little of the bad Buddy in Arnold s film, there not being much newsreel footage of the angry moments.

Her film lives by that footage, some of it still very familiar to those who witnessed the Cianci saga unfolding in the newspapers and on television. Anyone who was here during the Cianci years will remember it. It s all put together and commented upon with great thought and is narrated matter-of-factly by James Woods.

It s a historic document, yet at this point it also seems like old news.
Narrator: James Woods.
Rated: Not rated, contains adult themes.