City Island

Everyone in the world probably thinks that their family is a little peculiar. Well the Bronx family portrayed in Raymond De Felitta’s new feature film takes that presumption to a whole other level. The Rizzo Family is probably a lot like your own family in the sense that they too conceal a lot of intimate details from one another. De Felitta wrote and directed this story about how misguided assumptions can tear apart even the closest of relatives. Based on the previews, it seemed that this was a modern satire along the same lines as Little Miss Sunshine or Juno. I was wrong to make such a generalization of the film. While there are a great number of hilarious scenes and circumstances in the movie, it stands out as more of a family dramedy than anything else. As we watch the members of the Rizzo clan, we discover that neuroticism as we know it, is nothing compared to that of these folks. Everybody has a secret that they are keeping, but the dramatics escalate when those secrets start to affect everyone else.

The movie itself premiered at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival last July and won the Heineken Audience Award. I recently got the chance to meet De Felitta at a screening that was held at the IFC Center in Manhattan a few weeks ago, where he freely discussed City Island with active members of the Producers Guild. He described the film as a “labor of love” and a collaborative effort of many, particularly the actors. Apparently there are several improvised segments of dialog that appears in the final cut that were completely created by the actors; including one of the scenes with Academy Award-Winner Alan Arkin who plays a knavish acting teacher criticizing his student’s methods.

Alan Arkin as Michael Malakov

Anyone who has ever been to City Island could safely say that it is a sleepy little community on the outskirts of the outskirts of the Big City. As a predominantly blue-collar fishing town, the area retains much of its personality from its residents. There are two common phrases that are highlighted early on in the film: Clam Digger and Mussel Sucker. A Clam Digger is someone who was born and raised on City Island and who has lived their entire life there. A Mussel Sucker is anyone else who immigrated there from somewhere else. It’s New England-esque demeanor and obscurity alone accounts for much of the overall ambiguousness of the film. The island itself is only a few miles long and about three-quarters of a mile wide. It has a profound history of being a shipbuilding center for some of our country’s greatest vessels, including some prominent World War II battleships. This is the unique setting of De Felitta’s story that centralizes around an atypical Italian-American family that fights about everything imaginable, but deep-down really loves and cares about each other despite it all.

Andy Garcia as Vince Rizzo

The patriarch of the Rizzo Family is Vince Rizzo, portrayed by Andy Garcia, who is experiencing a midlife crisis. Like most everyone else in his life, he has some sense of dissatisfaction with his current situation. He works as a “corrections officer”, not merely a prison guard as he adamantly points out throughout the film. But what Vince really aspires to be is an actor. He has secretly been taking a regular acting class in Manhattan without anyone in his family knowing about it. And resorts to reading his various acting books while perched out of a skylight in the family bathroom. Vince is particularly fond of Marlon Brando and even goes as far as mimicking him at his first ever film audition. Most audiences are not used to seeing Garcia in comedic roles. He nonetheless delivers as the working-class aspiring actor who is trying to reconnect with his family, his entire family. Most everyone at some point in their life has sought something or someone that seemed out of reach. Garcia successfully conveys this simple-minded guy Vince who wants something more than he has, but is still very uncertain about himself because of his circumstances of being a Clam Digger.

Julianna Margulies as Joyce, with Dominik García-Lorido as Vivian

Vince has been lying about taking this acting class to his wife Joyce, played by Julianna Margulies. As far as she thinks, whenever Vince goes out, he is at his regular poker game. But soon starts to suspect otherwise, when she tries to contact him at work on the very same day he calls in “sick” so that he can attend an open call audition for a new Martin Scorsese picture. To fuel her suspicions,  when she discovers that Vince has been hiding his friendship with a female classmate (Emily Mortimer), Joyce presumes the worst. So begins needless turmoil and heartache on her part because she assumes that her husband is cheating on her. It has been a while since we have seen Margulies in any kind of role. She came out of a suto retirement to do this film after Garcia personally asked her to get involved. Her big screen comeback exposes yet another facet of the Emmy Award –winning actress’ talents. Despite the fact that the audience knows the truth about what is actually going with Vince, we still feel sympathy for Joyce’s circumstance because of the emotional duress crafted by Margulies. As a middle-aged housewife it is easy to understand why Joyce would feel neglected and spiteful. Though it is understandable that this situation could easily be misconstrued by anyone, all it really reinforces are the stereotypes that husbands are completely ignorant of the emotional sensibilities of their wives, and that wives are irrational when it comes to matters of the heart and more often than not jump to the wrong conclusions.

Steven Strait as Tony

To her detriment, Joyce takes a keen interest in Tony (Steven Strait), the ex-convict who Vince takes into their home as part of his parole because he is his son. No one else knows that he is his biological child though, not even Tony himself. In his mind, Vince is just a prison guard doing him a favor because he knew his mother once upon a time. And that is the same explanation that Vince gives his family. The plot thickens when Joyce become attracted to him, which is easy to understand considering that he spends much of his time working without a shirt on and that she thinks her husband has been cheating on her. This situation directly parallels Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex”. As we watch the extent of their physical involvement develop, we can predict that trouble is arising with a capitol T. Strait himself is a relative newcomer to the film industry, whose most prominent role was as the main hunter D’Leh in Roland Emmerich’s 10,000 BC. In City Island however, we get to see more than just physical acting from him. Strait shows great promise here and hopefully he won’t waste his potential doing aimless adolescent roles in purely box office driven teen movies. 

Ezra Miller as Vince Jr., aka Vinnie

Vince and Joyce’s two children Vivian and Vinnie (Ezra Miller & Dominik García-Lorido) each have their own share of secrets. Vivian who is supposedly home on Spring Break has been working as a stripper in lieu of being a college student. She is Andy Garcia’s real life daughter and seemingly had no problems countering her dad on screen. Vinnie has an unusual fetish for large fat women and spends most of his time fantasizing about his neighbor and other obese women on the Internet. According to De Felitta, they kept adding more and more screen time for Miller because he was charismatically contributing hilarious improvisations during the filming. It seems that the whole Rizzo family is lying about one thing or another. Which is the unifying plot point of the entire film.

The movie on the whole conveys the most unlikely of circumstances and still presents genuine emotion for the characters. It is not purely a situational comedy though, and De Felitta takes the audience on an entertaining roller coaster ride of human predicament. Garcia, who was also a producer on the film, was very pleased with his collaborative efforts with the director, “We became partners in the movie, and went on this journey together. We have similar sensibilities.” In all, there is a pretty basic story line going on here, despite the intentionally convoluted twists and turns. The film itself never looses sight on its characters and justly earns its classification as a dramatic-comedy. Enjoyable and entertaining from start to finish, I believe that most viewers will be able to identify with the fact that we all have secrets of our own.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ 1/2
Bottom Line: A charming story about a dysfunctional family laced with endearing little twists. A tad predictable but still fun nonetheless!