Corrections officer Vince Rizzo (Andy Garcia, who also served as one of this movie’s fifteen producers) has a secret: he’s been sneaking into the city to attend acting classes. He’s been telling his wife, Joyce (Julianna Margulies), that he’s been playing poker with the boys, but she thinks he’s having an affair. Vivian (Dominik Garcia-Lorido), their daughter, is supposed to be attending college, but she lost her scholarship and has taken to stripping in order to raise the cash she needs to re-enroll.

Vinnie (Ezra Miller), their son, enjoys internet porn, especially that involving large women; imagine his surprise when he discovers the family’s neighbor is involved in the business. And then there’s Tony Nardella (Steven Strait), a young convict Vince brings home as part of a supervised probation program. Vince tells the family he used to know Tony’s late mother, but that’s not the whole truth; Tony is the son Vince abandoned two decades earlier, something he’s kept hidden from everyone.   

CRITIQUE

Writer-director Raymond De Felitta’s City Island is like four episodes of a by-the-numbers sitcom rolled into one. Its plotting and characterizations would be right at home on a weekly television series, its pat, unbelievably trite and forced ending even more so. The movie relies almost entirely on the efforts of its cast to make things work, and while the cast does try to make the most of it, not even their valiant efforts can camouflage just how lamely overwrought the script is. Imagine if Tyler Perry had been the mastermind behind Everybody Loves Raymond and you’ll have a pretty good understanding of this movie’s problems.

Although it would still be transparent, contrived, and more than a little annoying, City Island would be much easier to take were it in fact a sitcom. You wouldn’t expect much from it, and not much is what you’d get, making it acceptable background noise or an okay way to kill thirty minutes; but dragging it out to two hours, casting it with actors whose talents are above the material, expecting you to actually shell out money for it, and projecting it onto a big screen changes the rules, and the movie falls short.

I can’t decide which of the four plots De Felitta (who also directed The Thing About My Folks and Two Family House, which also play like extended pilots) came up with first, but it’s clear he did hatch one and then attempt to pad it out with the other three (or four, depending on how you want to count them). Focus on any one thread of the plot and you realize just how undernourished and artificial the others are (and how they don’t really go anywhere). The last half hour, during which all of the plots come to a head at the exact same moment (brought about by the fact the characters are stupid enough to leave clues as to their activities lying around where they can easily be found), is so contrived De Felitta must have been sweating blood while typing it. And this blood loss, accompanied by a subsequent loss in mental faculties, would go a long way toward explaining why he stacked incident upon incident, problem upon problem, and then has everything suddenly be A-OK, tying it all up in a pretty bow.   

All of this may have worked (to a degree, at least) had the movie been played like a dizzying screwball comedy, but while it has the structure of one, it doesn’t have the tone or energy. The scenes where the characters run around and scream at one another are broken up by moments where the movie grinds to a halt and everyone starts getting serious and touchy-feely. (In yet another plot contrivance, Emily Mortimer plays Garcia’s partner at the acting workshop, and her character exists solely to spout dialogue that sounds as if it were pulled from the sort of self-help books you find in grocery stores.) So for every scene that comes close to almost working, you get a scene that lets escape what little steam has been built up and stops the movie dead in its tracks.

I know there are people who would enjoy this movie. It won an audience award when it played Tribeca, which is something, I suppose (although the fact that part of it takes place in Tribeca may have had something to do with this). Even so, it’s kind of hard to suggest you actively seek out something that resembles so much of what you can readily access simply by hitting a button or two on your TV’s remote. The acting’s certainly better than most of what you’ll find on the tube, but nothing else is.

THE VIDEO

The 1.78:1/1080p transfer--encoded with AVC--makes the movie look like the low-budget indie flick it is. And it’s perfectly fine for what it is, largely dependent on any scene’s shooting conditions for quality. Daytime exteriors can look relatively good, but low-lit interiors and nighttime scenes can be somewhat noisy and flat.

THE AUDIO

Lossless audio comes in the form of an uncompressed PCM 5.1 track. The movie’s sound design is so constricted this might as well be a mono track; there’s no surround activity whatsoever, and only a minimal stereo spread, so the vast majority of the audio is channeled to the center. Most of the mix is dialogue, which at times can sound very flat. A Dolby Digital 5.1 track is also included; English SDH and Spanish subtitles are available.

THE EXTRAS

The commentary by Raymond De Felitta and Andy Garcia is a not-bad track, laidback and largely informal.  

Dinner with the Rizzos (16 minutes, SD) is a making-of piece in which De Felitta, Garcia, Margulies, Garcia-Lorido, and Miller sit down for a meal and talk about the movie.

A few deleted and extended scenes (15 minutes, SD) include more hysterics, more boredom, and a much longer version of the movie’s final scene.

You also get the movie’s give-everything-away theatrical trailer (which is presented in high-def).

A digital copy of the movie is also included.

FINAL THOUGHTS

The actors make City Island hard to hate, but the script makes it hard to like.