Like
father, like son? Do genetics predestine us or do we have
a choice? City by the Sea, based
on a true story recounted in a 1997 Esquire article
written by Michael McAlary, asks both questions. The first
is answered more or less in the affirmative, the second by
taking the side of free will. To do so, director Michael Caton-Jones
devotes the first half of the film, which moves slowly, to
the screwed-up lives of the principal characters; the second
half, which speeds up, deals with the consequences. The city
is Long Island's resort city of Long Beach and its boardwalk.
When the film begins, we see through a blurred lens a happier
time when Long Beach was crowded and prosperous; the contemporary
Long Beach that we see in the film still has sand, but the
surrounding buildings are rusting hulks, boarded up, a paradigm
for the people who were once in their prime and now are fading
away, taking the present generation along. Vincent La Marca
(played by Robert De Niro) is a veteran NYPD police officer
whose father was executed as a murderer. Although La Marca
tried his utmost to live a life and career beyond reproach,
fourteen years earlier he walked out on a wife (played by
Patti LuPone) and six-year-old son. The wife, he now says,
was a "bitch," but his son Joey (played by James
Franco) grew up without a father; shattered due to paternal
neglect, he is now a junkie. La Marca lives alone but has
a girlfriend Michelle, (played by Frances McDormand). Joey
also has a sometime girlfriend, Gina (played by Eliza Dushku),
who later in the film presents La Marca with a two-year-old
grandson, the first he knew anything about him. But after
Gina runs out, La Marca commits the grandson, sobbing, to
a social services agency, claiming incompetence to be his
guardian. Indeed, all the characters in the film have difficulties
showing any responsibility to anyone else, and the third question
thus becomes the Biblical "Are we are brothers' keepers?"
The plot revolves around Joey, who always seems to be in the
wrong place at the wrong time. On one occasion he struggles
in the rain with someone, a shot is fired, and the other person
is dead, though the real culprit appears to be his friend
Spyder (played by William Forsythe). Next, police officer
Reg Duffy (played by George Dzunda), La Marca's partner, tries
to apprehend Joey in his hideout by the sea; but Spyder, there
at the time, shoots and kills Duffy. Joey then telephones
his father to say that he did not commit either murder. But
the police are railroading him despite clues that point to
Spyder. La Marca then resigns so that he can do his own investigation,
but a younger cop, perhaps his successor, shares possible
exculpatory evidence, and La Marca likewise informs him where
Spyder is likely to be found. In the showdown scene, Joey
murders Spyder for threatening his father. La Marca then tries
to arrest his son, who in turn prefers "suicide by cop,"
that is, to come out shooting so that the police artillery
will gun him down. In a very emotional De Niroesque speech,
La Marca tells his son that he was wrong to have walked out
on the family fourteen years earlier, that he loves him, that
he wants to be forgiven, and the two hug. The final scene
has La Marca playing with his grandson at the same place by
the sea where he once played with Joey. Presumably, Joey is
in prison, and La Marca has become a committed family man.
The female characters, however, seem unable to answer the
third question affirmatively because they never experience
a cathartic confrontation calling out for redemption. MH
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