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“City Island” is a movie about secrets, lies and the silly ways people make things worse when they’re afraid to buck up and be honest. As if suckered into the behavior of its waggishly irresponsible characters, the film puts up a front of its own.
Written and directed by New York-based filmmaker Raymond De Felitta, it purports to be a loose exploratory study of the tiny Bronx fishing village of the title, a setting not often captured on film. Creating a minimal sense of place, it is instead a madcap melodramatic farce involving a dysfunctional family that just happens to live there. It is the first of many inconsistencies.
Wildly uneven, yet still oddly watchable, the movie shows De Felitta had a mishmash of ideas and decided to cram them into one schizophrenic narrative.
The main character is Vince Rizzo (a terrific Andy Garcia), a prison guard who secretly takes acting classes in Manhattan. Joyce (Julianna Margulies), his not-so-good wife, secretly pines for the estranged son (Steven Strait) who he brings home from the joint. His younger son (Ezra Miller) secretly fetishizes fat women, and daughter (Dominik GarcÌa-Lorido) secretly strips for tuition money. Nearly all the family members smoke on the sly as well,
There’s a degree of poetic intimacy to certain slices, but in no way do they complement the screamy, sitcom-ish nature of the rest of the pie, and rarely do they feel like real slices of life. Different characters seem to be in different films, and De Felitta, though a gifted writer of dialogue, lingers on the more interesting storylines while slighting the others (Vince’s humble quest for a small role in a Scorsese picture is a hoot, but it’s conspicuously superior).
Some redemption comes via an inevitable climax of genuine, if exaggerated, laughs and tears, in which everyone finally starts telling the truth. Among other things, I wish De Felitta could have done more of that himself.
Two-and-a-half reels out of four
City Island
PG-13
Opens tomorrow at Ritz at the Bourse
An Education
PG-13
Available Tuesday
Like “Precious,” but set on the other side of the pond and, certainly, the other side of the tracks, “An Education” is a 2009 coming-of-age tale about a teenage girl which lets us watch the blossoming of not just a bold and beautiful character, but an exciting new actress.
Bright young Brit Carey Mulligan earned an Oscar nomination for her breakthrough performance. Mulligan plays Jenny, an Oxford-bound bookworm whose dying to live a little and gets her chance when she meets older bon vivant David (Peter Sarsgaard). Nick Hornby’s script is far too safe for such a stylish, built-on-nerviness import, but director Lone Scherfig intoxicates us with the aroma of David’s posh world.
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