City Island
Directed by Raymond De Felitta
Have you ever really wanted to love a movie? I don’t mean the way children and teenagers do when they get all excited to see the latest Pixar presentation or superhero epic. I mean because the movie itself seems to be a labor of love, rather than merely an object of commerce, and because its subject matter is dear to your heart. That is the way I felt before I went to see a new film called City Island, the sort of small, character-driven comedy-drama that was once a staple of the new Hollywood before the era of the blockbuster set in with the release of Jaws in 1975.
City Island is a sliver of land off the Northeast Bronx that was once a fishing village populated by Italian families in salt box houses; it’s still primarily Italian, and is still a home to boats, though not to commercial fishermen. It’s a couple of blocks wide and a little over a mile long, and it sits in the waters of the Long Island Sound, 8 miles due north of the Empire State Building, a few miles beyond La Guardia Airport. It’s one of the little-heralded and most picturesque spots in New York City and, perhaps most important, it was the site of my third date with the woman who would become my wife.
It’s a great and original setting for a New York movie. The movie’s writer-director, Raymond De Felitta, made use of a similarly obscure New York locale in his wonderful and tiny Two Family House, a story of an interracial romance on Staten Island in the late 1950s released 10 years ago. De Felitta presented the characters and surroundings of Two Family House with unsentimental but affectionate precision, and that approach portended only good for his treatment of City Island. His new movie is about a prison guard named Vince (Andy Garcia) and a secretary named Joyce (Julianna Margulies); they live in the City Island house his grandfather built. They have two kids, a college-age daughter, and a son in high school, and they have reached a point in their marriage where they seem both entirely comfortable with, and entirely exhausted by, each other.
I had every hope for City Island, because of De Felitta’s record and because movies about working class Bronx Italians have a surprisingly high rate of excellence—from Marty, the great 1955 Paddy Chayefsky tale of a lonely butcher and his Saturday night date, to True Love, the extraordinary and underappreciated 1989 picture about the wedding weekend of two immature 20-year-olds.
There are indeed some wonderful things here—in particular, the depiction of a family whose members instinctively, comically, but ultimately corrosively keep secrets from each other. Vince harbors dreams of being an actor, but tells Joyce instead that he has a poker game to go to. She assumes he’s having an affair, and strikes up a secret flirtation with a recent prison inmate named Tony (Steven Strait), whom Vince has brought home from work to help him finish a boat shack in back of their house. Tony is the biggest secret of all; Vince figures out that Tony is his son, the issue of a relationship before he met his wife.
The kids have secrets, too, and the casual dishonesty with which they all interact leads to pointless and hilarious fits of temper and derision at the dinner table observed with bemused confusion by Tony the ex-con, who doesn’t know Vince is his father.
Garcia and Margulies are both delightful and winning; Garcia hasn’t seemed so vital in years, and Margulies is pitch-perfect. And yet there are some very, very long stretches in City Island where the movie just slips away from you. At times it descends into unconvincing and unfunny farce—as when the wiseacre teenage son indulges his obsession with obese women on the Internet. At others, it moves into fairy-tale territory when, using the life story of his secret son, Vince captures the attention of the director Martin Scorsese during an open-call audition for Scorsese’s next film.
A sharp little movie about ordinary people like City Island gets us to care about its characters not because they do anything glamorous or exciting but because they are interesting in and of themselves. Such a movie centers on an assertion—the assertion that everyone has a story to tell, no matter his social standing, and no matter whether he lives in the White House or on City Island. Such a movie loses its emotional appeal and power when that character’s story no longer seems like a story that could happen to anyone, and instead becomes a fantasy of escape from circumstances that the real-world versions of the characters themselves would not wish to escape.
Though it has manifold charms and virtues, in the end, City Island is a little engine that could have, but didn’t, quite.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic.
