Robert De Niro is present on anybody's list of the five greatest living actors. So why does he feel the need to star in three movies per year, when he seems enthused about no more than one? \City By the Sea"" isn't a bad movie, certainly better than ""Showtime,"" but De Niro shouldn't have bothered with this one and neither should you.
""City By the Sea"" is based loosely on the true story of Vincent LaMarca (De Niro), a New York detective and son of an executed murderer who is forced to track down his estranged junkie son (James Franco) in a murder investigation. The movie follows the path of LaMarca in his dealings with the investigation and his girlfriend (Frances McDormand). It deals separately with his son Joey's problems with addiction and his ex-girlfriend and mother of his child (Eliza Dushku), until the father and son's lives are forced to once again intertwine, 14 years after LaMarca left his wife and Joey.
Some of the problems with ""City By the Sea"" seem to be in bringing a true story to the screen, because the filmmakers clearly struggle with how to work in and alter background information and how to inject themes and characters into a very sad story. Too much of De Niro's character seems to be written, not acted, while most of the movie's themes are over-explicated. Not that the themes are necessarily bad; the theme of generational parallels is fairly strong, but the theme of redemption is ineffective, because the movie is so emotionally unsatisfying.
But the movie's problems don't stop there. First and foremost is that De Niro really seems to be mailing in his performance. Granted, a legendary actor mailing in his performance is better than most, but De Niro simply does not offer a performance worthy of himself.
The direction is also detrimental to the movie's good intentions. It almost seems at times as though director Michael Caton-Jones (""The Jackal,"" ""Rob Roy"") directed the movie on the fly, simply putting in every idea that entered his head. The pace of the movie is wildly inconsistent, creating an inexplicably slow 108 minutes. Meanwhile, the soundtrack is poorly constructed and is used, along with the score, in an almost random fashion. ""City By the Sea"" ends up seeming like a movie with a lot of thought put into it that wasn't thought through enough.
That's not to say that the movie is without bright spots. De Niro shares charming scenes with McDormand, with the latter giving a strong performance in her supporting role. James Franco also handles the tough junkie role very convincingly, albeit with very nice teeth for a junkie. Alongside Franco, Dushku also pulls off the simultaneous roles of junkie and New Yorker, all while being quite beautiful for a recovering heroin addict. Plus, it's always nice to see George Dzundza on screen again, even if he plays the same friendly cop partner he played in ""Law and Order"" and ""Basic Instinct.""
""City By the Sea"" is also good for those of us who are slightly homesick New Yorkers, because images of the ugliest parts of the Jersey shore, where the Long Island parts were shot, will make anybody stop missing the East Coast.
As an aside to that, it was nice to see that they didn't edit the World Trade Center out of the skyline like the makers of ""Serendipity"" did. None of us want to erase its formerly innocuous existence from our memories, so why should Hollywood? The only downside is that the WTC's presence shows that the movie was made quite a while ago, and anyone who goes to see ""City By the Sea"" will understand why it sat on a shelf for months.
