City Island

(2010)

Directed by

Raymond De Felitta

Review by Zach Saltz

Posted - 6/19/10

City Island takes the premise of a 30-minute television sitcom and turns it into a feature length comedy of errors and lightweight misunderstandings.  Does this mean the movie, like current TV sitcoms not named The Office and 30 Rock, is shallow in its treatment of one-dimensional caricatures played out for grossly over-the-top cheap laughs?  Absolutely not.  Hey, it’s not Tolstoy, but it’s not a daytime soap either, even though it provides about as many shocking family revelations as both could muster up on even their best days.

(Makes me think of what a Leo Tolstoy TV soap would look like: “Tune in next week to find out that Ivan Ilych isn’t really dead!”)

Anyway, the film stars Andy Garcia as Vince Rizzo, a hard-working, blue-collar Italian-American prison guard who lives with his colorful family in The Bronx.   On the outset, Vince Rizzo is not a particularly original character; twenty years ago, Vince’s role would have been played by Danny Aiello or John Turturro.  But in City Island there are two things that make this prototypical patriarch stand out– first, that he’s played by Andy Garcia, who sheds his soft-spoken, mysterious brooding personality schtick faster than you can say, “Canoli!” and, second, Vince’s dark secret isn’t that he whacked Tommy Two-Tone’s brother or is head of the mob, but that he has a secret love of acting. 

Indeed, when Vince slips away from his doting and sharp-tongued wife, Joyce (Julianna Margulies), after dinner, he attends an acting class where he strikes up a rapport with another aspiring, if not glib, thespian (Emily Mortimer).  In the process, the audience is privy to the deceitful transgressions of the other members of the Rizzo clan –  acerbic son Vince Jr.’s illicit fetish for fat chicks, hottie daughter Vivian’s secret employment as a stripper, and even the unapologetic moves Mom puts on Tony, a young criminal Vince mysteriously brings home from the prison one night (the audience knows his story, too).  Since the movie is rated PG-13, the characters are never in real danger, so we can laugh at things like Tony stealing Joyce’s car to drive to Vivian’s strip club.

Tony is the dramatic conceit that introduces us to the capital-D dysfunction of the Rizzo clan, witnessing all of their guile firsthand.  He doesn’t say much, but then again if he did, all of the secrets would be revealed and City Island would subsequently run about 18 minutes long.  It would also rob us of a surprisingly effective subplot involving Vince earning a movie audition going off little more than a ridiculous Brando imitation, all the while cluelessly sidestepping the seeming advances from the Anglo-wraith Mortimer (the fact that they don’t sleep with each other is endearing given the sex-driven tendency of most American comedies.)

Movies like this fail more often than they succeed for three principal reasons: A) The misunderstandings become so obvious and so contrived that they undermine the intelligence of the characters we’ve grown to like and respect; B) The gags are either raucous, offensive, unoriginal, or stupid; or C) We’ve never liked the characters in the first place, so we don’t really care what happens to them.  None of those things are true of City Island, which is more than a little remarkable given how preposterous the climatic finale is where all the secrets are finally revealed.   But the finale is also undeniably hilarious, providing an operatic street confrontation worthy of Scorsese by way of Abbott and Costello.  The movie is peppered with clever one-liners, and there is a genuine charm to the characters that make even their worst actions kind of noble, if not redeemable.

The actors are very good here, too.  Lord knows, one more “No fighting at the dinner table!” sequence may incite me to call for the boycott of all families and dinners from the movies.  But Garcia and Margulies are awfully believable as a long-married pair who some days could qualify themselves as long-suffering; but of course, once the misunderstandings subside, they fall helpless to each other.  And the Italian clichés are kept to a minimum for the most part, save Vince’s chest hair, Joyce’s crucifix necklace, and the overall stench of pasta sauce occasionally protruding from the screen.

City Island doesn’t break new ground, but does forge characters and situations that are likable and funny – a rarity in the Apatow age of comedy when characters need to be profane or make trendy pop culture references in order to merit a laugh.  This is a motion picture that recalls the breezy charm of a Honeymooners episode, but with a decidedly modern (semi-Oedipal) edge that non-Puritans with a sense of humor can enjoy equally.

One complaint: The title.  City Island sounds like a futuristic sci-fi flick with Leonardo DiCaprio (maybe they should have called this film Inception).  Titles ruin more movies than you think – Pixar’s been particularly guilty of this in recent years, with Cars and Up being two of the most bland titles since . . . well, Toy Story.  The film isn’t flimsy enough for the title City Island to completely ruin it, but a rewrite would have been necessary.  My suggestion: Italians Lie.

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