City Island: Go

America simply cannot get enough of Kevin James and Jennifer Aniston. This validates the belief of film production companies that we are a nation of retards who are mesmerized by bright, shiny things and who gleefully buy into the hype we are force-fed ad nauseum.

Grown Ups (10% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes), 2010’s highest grossing comedy, and The Bounty Hunter (7%), which opened on March 19^th of the same year, combined for just about $230 million at the box office and netted over $100 million over their production budgets.

City Island, also a comedy, opened on the same day to somewhat less fanfare (using an average ticket price of $10, about 3,200 people saw it during its first weekend in theaters).

This movie initially appealed to me because of its setting in the Bronx. As a native New Yorker (FINE, Long Islander), I’ve always enjoyed viewing different takes on the world’s capital. City Island, a little known and even less-traveled fishing community of 4,000 surrounded by the East River, is the heart of this film.

City Island is one of those unique places that can enhance the thematic development of a film. As Molly muses, it is “New England via Washington Heights,” and the director and writer, Raymond De Felitta, expertly transforms the location into a pervasive, silent character.

At its core, however, the story is a familiar one in cinema: the consequences of a family’s abject failure to communicate with one another. The audience bears witness to the unraveling of their lives as the lies, half-truths, and words unspoken take their toll through crossed signals and misunderstandings. And hilarity does, in fact, ensue.

The 16-year old son has an obsessive fetish for feeding obese females (yes, you’ll have to read that back a couple more times). The overachieving daughter loses her college scholarship and resorts to blowies in the champagne room to pay tuition. The vitriolic, thin-skinned mother constantly feels attacked, scorned, and dismissed.

The cigarette-sneaking father, played by Andy Garcia, a corrections officer in Westchester, keeps the most damaging secrets of all. He constantly flees his family, purportedly for the poker table, but in actuality to nurture a pipe dream of becoming an actor. There is also the small matter of the convict son whom he sired and abandoned before his marriage.

De Felitta develops the humor of this deteriorating family dynamic in a very subtle, simple, and balanced way without shitting all over the serious and oftentimes all-too-real nature of the subject matter. The penultimate scene, in which the match is applied to the powder keg of their hidden lives, serves as the comedic pièce de résistance while managing one last ever-so-gentle tug at the heart strings.

As is befitting the blue collar atmosphere of its setting, the small cast, namely Garcia, Julianna Margulies, Steven Strait, Emily Mortimer, Ezra Miller, and Dominik Garcia-Lorido, turn in solid, workmanlike performances.


City Island was initially picked up for broadcast by Starz on the small screen and is currently heavy in their rotation. I anticipate that it will be eminently re-watchable with its digestible 104-minute run time and direct storyline.

It is truly lamentable that a well-done movie such as this, which gets the little things right and shuns the allure of excess, often never registers our collective consciousness and struggles to break even.

Cast and crew of City Island, I apologize on behalf of the citizens of our fine nation for not dropping our disposable income on your production. It is completely fucked out that Dear John will be considered a comparative success historically.