City by the Sea

Directed by Michael Caton-Jones
Robert DeNiro, FrancesMcDormand, James Franco
Warner Bros.
2002
R
108 minutes

The visual point of entry to Rembrandt's "Return of the Prodigal Son" (1669) has always been for me the father's face. From there, the artist's light source shines on the most salient points in the masterpiece and creates movement. My gaze is directed downward to the father's hands, one masculine and one feminine, to the son's worn shoes, across the bottom of the picture and up the garment of the "other" son, to his disapproving stare. I continue on, passing the faces of the obscure servant and family friend perhaps, to rest again on the enlightened visage of the loving Parent. This warm baroque work tells a story of great depth and beauty. We need no words because it goes right to the heart.

Light is essential to Rembrandt's art. It is unlike the later work of the Impressionists that contains its own light. Rembrandt's light comes from a cluster of outside sources, each one spotlighting the features that the artist wants our gaze to settle on first. Rembrandt's light is action and life that creates a living, emotional, holy picture.

City by the Sea is a dark, disturbing film with cinematography and art direction that could never create a Rembrandt. Instead, City by the Sea is a brooding, violent film that reminded me more of a Caravaggio. There were lanterns hanging everywhere, yet there was no light to be seen, no shining faces, instead, only shadows, sin and pain of life on the street. Caravaggio abandoned traditional ways of portraying religious themes and set his subjects in grime and gutters. He developed the chiaroscuro technique, the contrast of light and dark to tell a story with a painting. If City by the Sea is a painting, then Michael Caton-Jones seems torn between telling a story of fathers and sons (all prodigal with the exception of the baby), reconciliation and love, and the ruinous drugscape against which the story plays out, with more darkness than light. But the elements never quite come together. There is an artistic tension in the storyline and its portrayal that is never resolved and so I have to wonder why the film was ever made in the first place.

Michael Caton-Jones has an impressive directorial résumé that mostly includes films that make you care: Memphis Belle (1990), Doc Hollywood (1991) and Rob Roy (1995.) However, is terms of dark subject matter, technique and texture, City by the Sea reminds me most of his 1997 film The Jackal that mostly doesn't make you care because it doesn't make much sense. So, why the story of the DeMarco's appealed to Caton-Jones? I can only speculate.

2002 is the summer of the movies-based-on-magazine-articles. Blue Crush, a passable women's sports film, came first, based on "The Surf Girls of Maui" by Susan Orlean. Now we have City by the Sea, based on piece written by Mike McAlary. It is the story of a divorced New York homicide detective, Vincent DeMarco (Robert DeNiro) who has cut off relations with his son for fourteen years. Now, the son, Joey (James Franco) accidentally kills a drug dealer named Picasso in a fight. Joey is then implicated in the murder of his father's partner. He turns to his father for help, and Vincent, true cop that he is, urges his son to turn himself in. We find out that Joey's grandfather, Angelo, was executed for the murder of a child he kidnapped many years before, though he always held it had been an accident. Joey himself has a son out of wedlock. Fathers and sons, fathers and sons. Are the sins of the fathers visited on their children? It would certainly seem so in Long Beach, New York, the "city by the sea." Whatever inspired the filmmaker to interpret the magazine piece for cinema just doesn't seem to translate well to film. Or does it?

Picasso, the first character in the film to be murdered, gets his name from the tattoos he has on his body. The artist Picasso created art that some people question, too. His odd and grotesque portrayal of human figures, especially of women, make us wonder what was going on in his head that he had to disfigure them in order to satisfy his need to create visual metaphor for his reality. City by the Sea is based on a true story and can be seen as a metaphor for spiritual and moral disfigurement as well. In Picasso fashion, the women (played by Frances McDormand, Eliza Dushku and Patti LuPone) are mere cardboard figures in the background that the men basically ignore. The question is, does City by the Sea ever work as a film and as art?

The movie's texture reminded me of Blade Runner, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, Fight Club and the ruins of civilization that the television series Dark Angel tried to navigate. Real or not, the "city by the sea" is no resort, no safe haven, like the Key West of childhood memories that Joey pines for throughout the film. The film asks some of the same questions that we heard in Signs this summer, and last summer in the satisfying Life as A House (fathers and sons, fathers and sons, white fathers and sons): as human beings are we truly free? Do we have a choice? Does anyone care? Must we take responsibility for our actions, and if we do, why? Who is the real "me" and why can we never run from the consequences of our choices? What is the identity of these four generations of men, and is there any hope for any of them? These are great questions, and herein may lay the value of the film for some viewers.

Joey is trying to clean himself up from drugs and go straight, and to do this he needs his parents, especially his father. But his father is an emotional iceman. Some have criticized Robert De Niro's performance in City by the Sea as stiff. I asked myself: is this bad or disinterested acting, or is it real? How many young men have fathers who do not engage in the lives of their sons? On the other hand, how many fathers are involved in their sons lives, only to have them choose a path of destruction anyway? Is there any hope, do you think, on the face of the earth?

The denouement presents an impassioned plea from Vincent to Joey and we finally get a sense that it is the father's love speaking because an almost too obvious inner light, finally, shines through Vincent's face. It was Joey's departing utterance as spoken by the excellent James Franco that touched my heart the most. Of all the characters, he was the strongest because he is the first to realize that to live and to live with meaning, he had to change, and love was the only way to do that.

Georgia O'Keefe once wrote that true art irritates. City by the Sea tries to look like art and it certainly irritates, though maybe because it never makes the masterpiece cut. There are other films out there that treat of father-son relationships that left me more impressed. City by the Sea never made me care enough to be inspired, but it is not a wholly lost cinematic effort. It irritated me just enough to want to write about it.

Rose Pacatte, FSP is a Catholic sister and the Director of the Pauline Center for Media Studies in Culver City, CA.