City by the Sea Reviews

Shot in gloomy shades of gray, this earnest but banal story about the legacy of bad parenting strands fine actors in a contrived situation and lets them squirm. Loosely based ("inspired" might be the better term) on Mike McAlary's 1997 Esquire piece "Mark of a Murderer," this examination of grinding guilt and tentative redemption is played out against the mean streets of one-time resort town Long Beach, Long Island, whose blasted landscape mirrors the LaMarca family's emotional ruin. Veteran cop Vincent LaMarca (Robert De Niro) has spent his life compensating for the fact that his father was an executed child murderer. But the past will not be denied: Vincent's estranged, junkie son, Joey (James Franco), is accused of killing first a drug dealer, then Vincent's partner (George Dzundza). Is murder somehow twisted into the LaMarca DNA? Or did Vincent's neglect doom Joey? After an ugly divorce from Joey's shrewish mother, Maggie (Patti LuPone), Vincent retreated from his fatherly duties. He didn't mean to, but Maggie was a bitch who made it hard for him to see his son and poisoned the boy's mind against him. And Vincent's father didn't mean to kill the kidnapped baby whose death sent him to the electric chair — it was an accident, and the kidnapping a matter of desperation and bad judgment, not cold-blooded criminality. Perhaps the LaMarca legacy is actually failure to take responsibility, not murder in the blood, but the film is so knotted up in melodramatic agonies that everything else gets short shrift. Screenwriter Ken Hixon and director Michael Caton-Jones clearly trust neither the actors nor the audience. De Niro is never less than competent, even when he's coasting on a lifetime of accumulated technique, and Franco creates an impressively nuanced portrait of a young screw up who expresses his inchoate unhappiness in the kind of self destructiveness calculated to hurt everyone who loves him: his mother, his superficially tough girlfriend (Eliza Dushku), his baby boy and, of course, his father. As Vincent's new girlfriend, level-headed Michelle, Frances McDormand makes the most of an utterly thankless and superfluous role. But the dialogue hammers home the LaMarca dysfunction with numbing obviousness: Variations on the phrase "walk away" are worked into the dialogue at regular intervals like a gloomy mantra. And while the movie wears its real-life origins like a badge, the true LaMarca story has been so rejiggered in the name of drama that any resemblance to provocative but messy and inconclusive reality is purely coincidental.