All in the Family
By Michael Sean McGowan
Sandwiched between two family killers, Robert DeNiro plays a cop awash in grief in "City by the Sea."
City by the Sea is a movie of sometimes betrayed greatness. It works with great actors, a compelling idea, and a fine script, but in a few turns turns on the same kind of conventional, moral-bracing deck stacking that is almost the common denominator in most movies today. Let me give you an example of what I mean (Warning! Spoilers Ahead!).
Vincent Lamarca is a New York City cop who, over a decade before, left Long Beach, Long Island and moved to the city. His move was prompted less by a desire for promotion or a chance to work in the Big City and more by the need to flee the self-destructing household he helped create. Vincent left behind a son and wife and, from the tone of the dialogue in the film, seems to have never looked back.
City by the Sea catches up when his son, Joey (James Franco) is a strung out junkie trying to hawk his guitar to Long Beach passer-bys to get catch to make a score. Joey's dealing with a tattooed thug turns ugly and the guy comes after him with a knife. Jimmy, apparently not too fried to think about his own survival, struggles with the man and kills him, instead.
City by the Sea is based on a true-life story which, by all accounts, takes on dimensions more complicated and more unsettling than those depicted here. I have always been interested in the balance of morals used by filmmakers in a story. Not morals as in family values, but the levels and ways that a filmmaker will allow his or her characters to get dirtied up... and the limits placed on this process lest there be no chance for redemption from an audience to whom this is the common mode of things. When Joey kills the dealer, it is obviously self-defense so we, the audience, can't fault his desire to survive. The character creates no major moral breech. Later on, after Lamarca's partner (George Dzunda) is shot trying to track Joey down, we don't need footprint evidence to convince us that Joey isn't the shooter- if he was there would be no way to salvage audience sympathy for him and an optimistic wrap-up would be impossible.
I'm afraid, though, that this gives the wrong impression of City by the Sea. For all its faults this is a movie I like very much and the only reason I made the complaints above is that they those themes are so ill-matching to the rest of the film that they particularly stand out. The moral game play itself isn't always a bother- you find it in almost every commercial film. However, what my minor disappointment surrounds is the fact that City by the Sea is, in so many ways, above the ranking of a commercial film that for it to stoop to these levels is a particular let down.
The characters are what drive the movie in particular. I've never seen Robert DeNiro display quite so much grief or wounded pride as Vincent Lamarca, whose guilt over abandoning his family is evident and his fear of taking responsibility for another human being comes out when he turns over his newly-discovered grandson to Family Services after his mother abandons him. This pathos boils over at the end in a monologue for DeNiro to his son that is one of the most self-wounding I have heard come from him. Oscar-winner Frances McDormand plays a downstairs neighbor who Lamarca is romantically involved with. She is great solace for Lamarca- her adherence to routines and her aversion to commitment are particularly fitting to a man who, it seems, is only comfortable around "regular people" for minutes at a time. McDorman, despite her brief screen time, expands her role well and the film is smart to leave the plot thread involving her undone. Only Franco, as Joey, comes off hazy- his "Cat in the Cradle" wounded feelings getting lost in the acting haze of the generic junkie.
Director Michael Caton Jones, who made great use of lush Scottish landscapes in Rob Roy here also employs the environment but to a far different emotional reaction. In one scene, as Lamarca drives through the ghost town ruins of Long Beach he remembers how everything there was fresh and new and happy when he was a kid. The miles of broken glass and graffitied walls and left over remains of theme park amusements are the reminders of a childhood lost- Lamarca's came to an end when his own father was arrested and executed for the death of a baby during a botched kidnapping attempt.
City by the Sea is a movie with great intentions but, like Vincent Lamarca himself, when it gets into trouble has the tendency to run somewhere safe. This doesn't kill or even grievously wound the movie, but City by the Sea certainly isn't what it could have been. To paraphrase Roger Ebert, both Robert DeNiro and Michael Caton Jones have made movies like this before. Now it is time for them to go out and make a better one. B