MICHAEL CATON-JONES' new movie City by the Sea is a deft, exciting thriller with some serious issues on its agenda.
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City by the Sea
Directed by Michael Caton-Jones, written by Ken Hixon. Starring Robert DeNiro, James Franco, Frances McDormand and George Dzundza. Opens tomorrow. |
(out of 4)With insight and feeling, City by the Sea asks whether these men have choices, or if they're doomed by the forces of fate that seem to conspire against them.
Robert DeNiro stars as Vincent LaMarca, a professionally successful but personally distraught Manhattan detective who walked out on his young son, Joey, 14 years earlier.
James Franco (Spiderman, James Dean) plays Joey, a once-promising athlete turned junkie, and as the movie opens we see him getting mixed up in a murder.
Vincent is then assigned to the case and is forced with the choice of whether to arrest his son or rescue him.
Vincent is a good man, but he has had a tough life and has made some big mistakes. He is in a relationship with a woman (played by the always-excellent Frances McDormand) who loves him but can't abide by his emotional distance.
But now his son's crime is unexpectedly illuminating Vincent's painful past, forcing him to reexamine not only his relationship with McDormand, but everything in his life.
The movie shows, almost comically, how a single event can cause a chain reaction, dredging up long-buried skeletons. Meanwhile, Vincent's fellow cops hunt down his son, and Vincent's troubled past threatens to tragically repeat itself.
City by the Sea is Vincent's story — the movie's themes breath through him — and, understanding this, DeNiro gives his best performance in a long time. He actually acts here rather than simply relying on his image and performing the cliché DeNiro shticks — the squints, the f-bombs, the down-curled mouth and the threat of exploding violence that looms over his screen presence.
But for Vincent, DeNiro dulls the often-ferocious edge of his voice, and he has packed some dough around the middle to create a realistic, ordinary man. Vincent wants to do the right thing, but to some extent he has resigned his life to fate.
DeNiro must believably lead Vincent from passive resignation to fierce action, and he accomplishes this by playing Vincent as a man who is surprised to learn how much he still cares. His revelation culminates in a scene late in the film that is DeNiro's most emotionally shattering piece of acting since his climactic performance in The Deer Hunter.
Franco also gives a brilliant performance, portraying the terror and desperation of a drug addict, but he also gives Joey intelligence and heart. He reveals the 20-something character to be nothing more than a scared child who simply wants the love of his father. Franco exudes the fiery intensity of the generation of method actors that produced DeNiro and a generation earlier that gave way to Marlon Brando and James Dean.
City by the Sea is not an overly stylized film, though Caton-Jones (Scandal, Rob Roy) can't resist darkening the canvas with brushstrokes of film-noir to remind us of the genre in which City by the Sea has its roots. Rather, this is a nimble directing job, in which Caton-Jones forgoes certain trappings to concentrate on the complex ideas and relationships in Ken Hixon's screenplay.
Based on a Vanity Fair article by the late Mike McAlary, the script contains dialogue that is sharp, aware and tinged with sadness. Hixon pauses the forward motion once and a while for characters to make sideways comments on things outside of the plot, as real people might. Through their dialogue the characters comment on the subtext of loss and decay running through their lives.
And this is a story rich with subtext — a half dozen or so compelling themes course through it, among them the tenacious, almost mystical bonds between family, ideas of fate vs. choice, the redemptive power of love and the destructiveness of addiction.
Yet, both director and screenwriter deserve credit for never making the film solemn or preachy. In fact, it is so taut and exciting that only after the visceral experience of watching the movie do some of these themes resonate.
The most powerful film is that of the undying capacity of human beings for change and transcendence, even when all seems lost.
City by the Sea reminds us that even when fate seems to have things wrapped up, each of us can still choose who we are going to be. And whom we are going to love.
Reach the reporter at michael.green@asu.edu.
