Check out the hottie in the upper right.
By Nathan Gelgud
Juliana Margulies looks terrific! Maybe it’s the way she’s grown into her 40s without trying to hide it, or maybe it’s the bangs (she’s never had bangs before, has she?) or that Bronx dame eyeliner she’s rocking, but there’s something sexy and fascinating about the close-ups she gets in City Island, a new dramatic comedy from writer-director Raymond De Felitta.
But that’s about all there is to see here. As decent as Margulies’ performance of Joyce is, her graceful aging shouldn’t take up so much of a viewer’s attention. It’s just that there’s so little else to notice in the rest of the film. Andy Garcia, as her husband Vince Rizzo, is good—he’s always good. But Garcia plays a corrections officer who takes in a parolee who happens to be his secret son from a decades-old teenage fling. Needless to say, this throws Rizzo’s home life into turmoil, especially with his daughter home from college on spring break (or is she?) and his school-skipping son trying to come to terms with his fat-girl fetish.
If that’s not enough, Vince is deceiving Joyce by not telling her about the acting class he’s taking, and he strikes up a friendship with a young, pretty classmate (Emily Mortimer). Mortimer flits around in the margins of the movie and, in several cringe-inducing scenes, handles stressful situations by declaring them “Greek in scope.” Mortimer—who I’ve always quite liked until now—plays her character as such a negligible, cloying pixie that I actually wondered at one point if she’d turn out to be a figment of Vince’s imagination.
City Island is a tolerably charming, modest effort from a polite writer-director. All the information is where it needs to be, the outdoor scenes evoke the proper feeling of sunny outdoorsiness and some of the emotional mechanics of the predictable plot are well-placed enough. The mostly fine performances of its middle-star professionals push forward the predictable action at a mid-tempo pace.
But City Island is also so limp and colored so tidily inside the lines of faux-indie narrative, we can’t help but ask, as moviegoers and movie writers: Why bother? De Felitta seems downright deliberate about offering his audience little more to grapple with than an audacious closing-scene voice-over that spikes us in the face with an out-of-nowhere message about the importance of God. Thus, the writer-director hasn’t just made a boring movie—he’s made an insulting one.
City Island might be likeable and forgettable until you start figuring out what it means to be told not to think too much. At that point, no matter how hard the movie has tried to resist provocation, it becomes downright offensive. Maybe coming down hard on City Island is pointless.
City Island
Directed by Raymond De Felitta
With Steven Strait, Dominik Garcia-Lorido, Andy Garcia, Julianna Margulies and Ezra Miller
UA DeVargas
100 min
PG-13
