City By The Sea Recalls De Niro’s Glory Days

By Jeff Eason

These days Hollywood cannot release a movie without teasing you with trailers for months on end. In some cases the trailers begin to show the good parts of a movie well over a year before its theatrical release. It’s no wonder then that movie audiences sometimes feel like they’ve seen the movie before they ever step into the theater.

That’s why City by the Sea is so refreshing. Released with as little fanfare as any movie this summer, City by the Sea is marked by a superb script and wonderful performances by a solid cast led by Robert De Niro.

De Niro has always done his best work when working close to home and his performance in City by the Sea is no exception. The filmmakers appear to pay homage to De Niro’s earlier New York-set movies such as Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and even The King of Comedy. All those films presented the Big Apple and its surrounding boroughs in all their grittiness—all the glamour stripped away in an attempt to find some hidden realism.

This time around De Niro plays Manhattan cop Vincent LaMarca, a man who left his ex-wife and son in Long Beach (the Coney Island-esque end of Long Island) 14 years ago. The fatherless son, Joey (played with appropriate lack of sex appeal by newcomer James Franco), is now a wastoid Long Island junkie who accidentally kills a drug dealer named Picasso in a smalltime deal gone bad. Joey and his pal dump the body in the river but Picasso washes up the next day in his father’s precinct.

Picasso’s partner in crime is a local thug named Spyder (William Forsythe, toning down the menace for once). Once Spyder figures out who killed Picasso, he springs into action and tries to track down Joey and retrieve the $4,000 he thinks Joey stole from the dealer.

The stakes are at the same time petty and for keeps. Joey is playing for his life, Vincent is playing for his son’s life and his reputation as a policeman, and Spyder is trying cement his role as the leading drug lord in a dying Atlantic Ocean resort town.

The movie’s side stories involving Vincent’s state-executed father, Vincent’s love interest Michelle (the ever-wonderful Frances McDormand), Joey’s ex-girlfriend and baby all add to the story. It’s amazing how many times the love interest part of a story just bogs down a good taut crime thriller, but that’s not the case here.

City by Sea gets a lot of its strength in location shooting. Manhattan is well lit with neon and vibrant with people but is shabby-looking in close-ups. Long Beach is clearly long past its prime and its beachfront carnival architecture is ocean-faded and full of cavities. Whereas Road to Perdition glamorized Depression-era Midwest with its emphasis on grand Industrial-era architecture and flat green pastures, City by the Sea shows the audience a part of America sorely in need of some new infrastructure.

But the real star of the show is De Niro. Far too many times he has ended up in movies that play up the comedy or violence to the detriment of character development. Here he shines as a man facing the rest of his life knowing that the decisions that he made in his past and the decisions he makes right now will forever change not only his future, but the future of those around him. The two scenes of Vincent at first not being able to tell Michelle about his troubles and then overwhelming her with his sordid history is vintage De Niro. And of course, whenever you place McDormand within earshot of a great performance, she rises to the challenge.

Unlike many crime dramas these days, the violence in City by the Sea is subdued, non-gratuitous, and non-graphic. It’s not for the young or overly squeamish but not nearly as bad as most recent shoot-em-ups.