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Michael
Caton-Jones hasn’t made a studio film since the car wreck that
was The Jackal remake of 1997.
That brings no pleasure to me since I liked the director
who made Doc Hollywood, This Boy’s Life and Rob
Roy just before El Stinkerino.
Of course, the way Hollywood is, all people talk about
now is the career killer.
But the smarter,
gentler Caton-Jones is back with City by the Sea, a
tough film that works better as a gripping character study
than as a movie, but still is well worth the time.
DeNiro plays a regular guy who has just about found
a rhythm he feels good about and without warning is forced
out of his complacency and forced to face the demons of his
past, present and future.
And while it’s hardly the showiest of his roles, he
is as good here as he’s ever been. It’s almost as if he’s grown past the point
of trying to be a movie star, as he seemed to be doing in
a role of a similar tone in Night & The City.
He just is this guy here and its quite touching.
As his troubled
son, James Franco gets to act on the big screen for
the first time and he’s fine… this is an actor who still needs
to find his way to his own persona. His performance felt a bit chewed-over to me,
but it was still fairly effective.
The women
in these two men’s lives are excellent.
Frances McDormand does so little in her role
as “the girl downstairs” that you barely notice that she’s
taken a throwaway role and made it something memorable.
Patti Lupone as Franco’s mother and DeNiro’s
ex-wife is a letter-perfect shrew with a heart that’s been
turned to stone by life… at least with anyone but her son. And Eliza Dushku proves that she can
play more than saucy brunettes in tiny bikinis. She’s still saucy, alright, but she breaks out and brings more to
her character than you would ever expect from her first-act
scenes.
In a way,
Dushku and McDormand define the entirety of City by the
Sea. The entire movie is somehow unexpected. Scene after scene, you know what’s coming next.
But you’re wrong most of the time.
Not because they are trying to trick you, but because
life isn’t a movie. Apparently,
there is some controversy about some of the “facts” of the
movie, particularly the wrong-place-wrong-time nature of the
murder that kicks the whole thing off.
But unlike a movie such as A Beautiful Mind,
which seemed to allow it’s lead character to keep one too
many nuts in his can, those kinds of details didn’t bother
me because this is a story about ambiguity.
Every answer is just another question… even in the
coda at the very end of the film.
Caton-Jones
and his casting directors Amanda Mackey Johnson &
Cathy Sandrich also offer pleasant surprises with the
choices they made in supporting roles. William Forsythe hasn’t had this good
a role in a studio movie in a long, long time.
And he doesn’t just walk through it, even if it is
the most stereotypical role in the film. He brings it.
And he crackles in his scenes.
Brian Tarantina has been a caricature in the
past. But here, he takes a stereotype and brings it layers. And who could not love a movie where both George
Dzundza and Leo Burmester appear in the same scene. (And you thought they were the same person!)
Like my favorite
tv show of last year, Law & Order; Criminal Intent,
City by the Sea is a murder mystery without a mystery.
But also like L&O:CI, this film tells a story of
drugs and murder and decay, but manages to stay fresh, thanks
to great performances by great actors who don’t sleepwalk
for a second. And
while Caton-Jones doesn’t dazzle visually, he sets the groundwork
for these actors to work… which is what he is best at.
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