Also this issue:

City of the Future
Restored after 75 years, Metropolis still leads the way.
-Sam Adams

Neo Metro
Restoring Metropolis.
-Sam Adams

After Life
An aging thespian copes with loss in I’m Going Home.
-Sam Adams

September 5-11, 2002

movies

Like Grandfather, Like Son

In the jeans: James Franco canât seem to escape his roots.

A detective whose father was executed for murder investigates his stepson for the same crime.

City by the Sea

by Cindy Fuchs

City by the SeaDirected by Michael Caton-Jones A Warner Bros. release Opens Friday at area theaters

Things are looking bad for Joey Nova (James Franco). Slouching against the wind, he staggers down the Long Beach, Long Island, boardwalk, so desperate for a hit that he’s trying to sell his guitar for $40. Apparently, this marks a particular rock bottom for our boy, though it’s hard to tell, exactly. Maybe Joey Nova loves his music. But it could also be that he just stole that guitar. Maybe it means nothing.

Michael Caton-Jones' City By the Sea is full of such riddles, made more conspicuous because the bulk of what happens on screen is weighted with significance. Not only does Joey stab a dealer to death -- sort of by mistake, while in a movie-style junkie-fugue (so he might remain "sympathetic") -- his own father, Manhattan detective Vincent LaMarca (Robert De Niro), just happens to catch the case (because the body, dumped into the river, washes up in his jurisdiction). And not only is Vincent divorced from Joey's mother, Maggie (Patti LuPone), because he abused her in some dim and distant past, but his own father was executed for murder, many years ago.

All these horrors in one family might lead to questions concerning genetics and proclivity, codes of masculinity and violence (all this seeming perhaps especially topical, given the currently circulating Ward Weaver story). Indeed, these are the questions raised by the film's source, a riveting 1997 Esquire article by the late Mike McAlary, called "Mark of a Murderer." It's easy to see why the filmmakers considered this a worthy outline, but it's entirely unclear why writer Ken Hixon revamps the details so the plot becomes increasingly contrived and sensational.

All events are arranged to bring about Vincent and Joey's reconciliation, and all characters fodder to achieve that end. Vincent's girlfriend, Michelle (Frances McDormand), is reduced to telling him he needs to be a good dad, then disappearing. Maggie just happens to arrive on a murder scene (who knows how far this may be from her home), so that she can wail after her ex, "You're his father!"

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Unfortunately, the film condenses the McAlary article's focus on Vincent's father to a newspaper clipping and a few DeNiroean shuffles and grunts, as he tries to explain his various deceptions to Michelle. Here the focus is the Joey-Vincent mess, which piles on the agonies. Joey's many demons include snarling, inked-up biker-dealer Spyder (William Forsythe, who could play this character in his sleep, and essentially does), as well as his fears of becoming his father. And so, as he must in such an overheated circumstance, he heads exactly that way, abandoning his own baby and girlfriend Gina (Eliza Dushku), who in turn becomes a very bad mom, an out-of-nowhere "development" that allows Joey his own chance to become a good father.

As masculine melodrama, City By the Sea is standard and weak. Struggling to be stoic, potent and aggressive, Vincent and Joey only end up being selfish and violent, unable to see a way out. Though the film implies they both learn hard lessons about generosity and forgiveness, the final image -- a familial unit "at peace" but static, removed from community, and tellingly void of women -- suggests otherwise.