In “The Public,” a moralistic new melodrama that pits a group of cuddly homeless men against a soulless, uncaring bureaucracy, a character remarks on the difficulty of choosing the virtuous path in life. “Our biggest problem,” says a chirpy do-gooder (Jena Malone) early in the film, is knowing “which side of the ‘right’ we’re walking on.”
For other characters in this story — about the takeover of Cincinnati’s main public library by a contingent of street people, on the coldest night of the year — things are less ambiguous: “You’re either one of us, or you’re one of them,” says Jackson (Michael Kenneth Williams) the wise leader of the homeless siege, to the waffling head librarian, played by the ever-earnest writer-director Emilio Estevez.
It’s a little too on-the-nose that this librarian turns out to be a formerly homeless person himself — a man named Stuart Goodson (good son, get it?) — and that his main adversary, once Stuart decides to risk his job by letting the insurgents move in, is an overreacting cop named Ramstead (a moniker that neatly telegraphs the character’s intransigence and reliance on brute force over negotiation).
Much of Estevez’s film is similarly reductive. On one side are Stuart and Jackson, the charmingly rumpled, de facto representative of the dozens of homeless men — and yes, for some inexplicable reason, they are all men — who stage a protest movement by commandeering the library on a subzero night. And on the other side are Ramstead (Alec Baldwin) and the city’s coldblooded district attorney (Christian Slater), who implausibly promote the bizarre narrative that, despite all evidence, Stuart is holding the men hostage at gunpoint.
