City Island
- Written and directed by Raymond de Felitta
- Starring Andy Garcia, Julianna Margulies, Emily Mortimer, Alan Arkin, Steven Strait and Ezra Miller
- Classification: PG
You can imagine Bronx prison guard Vince Rizzo sidling in next to Archie Bunker on a New York bus piloted by Ralph Kramden. Like the stars of All in the Family and The Honeymooners, Vince is a regular guy driven mad by the world. As with Archie and Ralph, his wife is steering the car.
Here’s Vince (Andy Garcia) asking his temperamental spouse for a favour: “Make something special for dinner,” he smiles. “Like for a special occasion. Something nice.”
“Want balloons or something?” Joyce Rizzo (Julianna Margulies) frowns, cutting food coupons from a magazine.
“Nah, I don’t want balloons or something. I’m just saying something nice.”
“Don’t I always make something nice?”
“Make it nicer!”
“MAKE IT YOURSELF!”
Vince wants a banquet because his prodigal son is returning. Tony, this kid at the jail, reminds him of someone. Vince soon realizes the inmate is his son from a teenage affair. (Maybe the boy reminds him of himself.) After a series of hard swallows, Vince helps arrange the kid’s parole into his custody, without explaining why. He’ll figure out what to tell Tony and his sure-to-be-furious wife later. Hopefully, much later.
Spiralling Oedipal confusions ensue. Joyce suspects Vince is cheating on her. He’s been distant lately, so in retaliation she begins flirting with her stepson; not that she knows the last part. Tony (Steven Strait) is some hunky prison labourer her cheapskate husband has brought in to do repairs, Joyce figures. The 20-year-old visitor, in turn, is more interested in his half-sister, who the family believes is away at college. Actually, Vivian is a stripper.
Wait, there are more badly kept secrets, more commotion: Vince isn’t stepping out on his wife. Turns out he’s been cheating himself. The prison guard has always wanted to be an actor. Another Brando. Now, with the aid of his kooky agent (Emily Mortimer), he’s secretly auditioning for a Scorsese movie. Then there’s Vince and Joyce’s other boy, Vinnie (Ezra Miller, very good), a sarcastic, reed-thin high-school kid with a yen for lavishly overweight women.
Yes, it’s really complicated, life with the Rizzos. City Island probably has too many moving parts. Still, writer-director Raymond de Felitta (Two Family House) understands that a proper farce, like a good campfire, needs plenty of friction to get started. He also loves testing good actors the way car enthusiasts enjoy tooling around in a well-engineered automobile. Garcia and Margulies have never been better. Their scenes together are funny and harrowing, brimming with giddy danger. And Garcia delivers in one scene that other actors would give a year of their life for – the big audition sequence where Tony jumps off a cliff to see if he can fly as an actor.
Special to The Globe and Mail
