The Passengers
Thomas Mazziotti’s The Passengers unearths archival footage of 90s New York to reflect our collective past, but offers less novel self-reflection and more of an exposé on the personalities you find when you advertise in The Village Voice.
That sounds like a burn, but it’s not. Part of the allure of the metropolis is the kaleidoscope of grotesques we imagine lurking around each corner. Spotlighting the strange and self-absorbed isn’t solely a function of Mazziotti’s focus on the unusual and idiosyncratic over anything like an “everyman’s” experience. He’s certainly not the first documentarian to make that choice and he won’t be the last; it’s the reality of working in an ultimately narrative form as opposed to the recitation of quotidian experience. And it’s possible that these are the “everyday” of New York: a coterie of wounded, self-absorbed individuals drawn by the city’s whispers of fame, fortune and significance – and ultimately stranded there. Individuals who dwell on the pains done to them in youth, or who think continuously on the pain they actually enjoy and want to inflict on others, combined with a fear of boredom and lack of clarity on what to do about it. It is, if nothing else, an arresting cross-section of humanity.
Not that everyone interviewed fits into that mold. Some exhibit a broader awareness of the world, harboring a creeping, existential dread of life and its relentless onward march. A woman on the train meets an elderly survivor of the Pearl Harbor attacked and is moved to reflect on what it must have been like to live at that particular moment without realizing what it was. At the same time another interviewee reminisces on a dead body they saw on the street, someone who will never live long enough to witness epochal world events and the pass their stories on to their grandchildren or a young passerby.
It doesn’t particularly hide Mazziotti’s hand, he is fond of flashing updates to past important events as a reminder of what has and hasn’t changed even as life has gone on: the aforementioned Pearl Harbor attack, the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., Ronald Reagan and other things once mentioned in a Billy Joel song. It opens the question more how many of the interviews included were picked for their uniqueness and entertainment value, providing us our own escape from the world flowing around us and our own potential ennui, rather than what that might say about life at the time. And if that was the focus The Passengers succeeds. It’s compulsively watchable and there is an unmistakable feeling of authenticity even as deliberately bizarre and off-putting as its subjects can be.
It does raise questions about the world around those lives relative to events they are compared to, explicitly in the film itself and implicitly in the era in which we are viewing them. Opened up in 2022, the contents of the time capsule are coming to us in a post-Covid world after living through legitimately world changing events every bit as momentous as the ones in Mazziotti’s various title cards. By comparison, the world of the subjects, New York 1992, is more settled and mundane, almost banal, which says a lot about how inwards focused its view was at the time.
Perhaps a better version of this would have been to replace the footage in the time capsule with interviews conducted today to let a future generation see what we were like in the aftermath of a global upheaval. And maybe they'd discover the same thing The Passengers does, that we were always this self-absorbed and maniacal, we just notice it more now. In its reflexive exposure of curated oddity, its juxtaposition of private confession and public history, and its unflinching gaze at existential paralysis, The Passengers emerges not merely as a nostalgic artifact but as a searing critique—an elegy for a city and a medium that both seduces and emaciates the soul.
7.5 out of 10
Starring Christopher Todd, Monica Stagg, Stephanie Ritz, Joniruth White, John Walter, Leah Palen, Larry Whitfield, Rodney Rowland, Richard Castaldo, Henry Pincus, Marguerita Fahrer, Christopher Dinerman, John Limpert, Pasquale Gaeta, Cory Einbinder, Gabrielle Corsaro, Laura Yengo and Peter Cossack. Directed by Thomas Mazziotti.