City Island: Review By harveycritic

CITY ISLAND

Overture Pictures

Reviewed for MovieWeb by Harvey Karten

Grade: B+

Directed by: Raymond De Felitta

Written By: Raymond De Felitta

Cast: Andy Garcia, Julianna Margulies, Dominik Garcia-Lorido, Ezra Miller, Emily Mortimer, Steven Strait, Alan Arkin

Screened at: Dolby88, NYC, 2/10/10

Opens: March 19, 2010

There are those who believe that once you get married, you and your spouse should open yourselves up completely. Let it all hang out. But many a guru will tell you that we all have skeletons in our closets which are best to leave there along with the mothballs. In a movie which could have been entitled "Secrets," writer-director Raymond De Felitta seems to have his own ideas: that relationships can be strengthened only by revealing those intimate details that we hide from one another, the deeds that we've done that we're ashamed of as well as the stuff we're proud to reveal. We in the audience are lucky. Without the tensions held by people who are afraid to open themselves up, we'd never get all the laughs that De Felitta evokes not only by his clever dialogue but by the performances of a group of actors who appear to have been living together for years. "City Island" is a fun movie.

It's set on City Island, which is part of the Bronx and yet a special place, one which lifelong resident Vince Rizzo (Andy Garcia) anoints with the prophecy "You never want to leave." (I'm ashamed to say that as a lifelong Brooklynite who has been to India, China, Russia and Chile, I've never set foot on the title place.) Simulating a New England fishing village (yes, right here in the Bronx!), the one-mile isle is the home of a stereotypical Italian-American working-class family headed (or so he thinks) by Vince who works as a correction officer at the local prison. His good wife Joyce (Julianna Margulies) has a job answering telephones, his daughter Vivian (Dominik Garcia-Lorido) is supposed to be in college but her (secret) is that she works as a stripper, his (secret) son from another woman, Tony (Steven Strait) is a jailbird inhabiting the jail worked by his dad, and his teen son Vinnie( Ezra Miller) is a pro at wisecracks who has a (secret) passion for morbidly obese women such as his 350-pound neighbor. Vince has a (secret) desire to become a movie actor, taking classes with Michael (Alan Arkin), a drama coach who pairs him up for an assignment with another student, Molly (Emily Mortimer), who has a (secret) family upstate. Several family members (secretly) smoke.

Plenty of skeletons in this City Island closet, all of which play havoc with relationships that find the dinner table a hotbed of shouting and stomping out before the Chianti is half-finished.

The story is loaded with twists, information that we in the audience know about but subject to misinterpretations by the members of the family. For example, what wife would believe that the number belonging to Molly which she finds inside one of husband's books is for a woman who is nothing more than Vince's fellow student? And what can Joyce make of the book itself, which is about acting? For a prison guard? Fans of Julianna Margolies's work as the title character in the TV drama "The Good Wife" will marvel at the way make-up artists Jorjee Douglas, Joseph Farulla and Pamela May transformed Margolies from a restrained, upper-middle class lawyer to a working-class ethnic.