A Film Canon

A beautiful elegy for Long Beach, New York - although filmed largely in Asbury Park, New Jersey - City By The Sea draws out the male weepie lurking around the fringes of the American-immigrant family crime drama. Based very loosely on a true story, it condenses four generations of fathers and sons to the relationship between Vincent La Marco (Robert De Niro), a Manhattan policeman, and his estranged son Joey (James Franco). Joey's possible involvement in a murder case draws Vincent back to Long Beach, his home town, but the criminal narrative is largely extraneous, subordinated to the relationship between de Niro and Franco, who turn in two of their most striking performances. At first, De Niro seems somewhat lacklustre, but it's more the shock of seeing him do naturalism - especially in a role that's so redolent of his most operatic parts, and of Taxi Driver's most impressive fare in particular  - while Franco's body language, huddled and strung out on empty, desecrated boardwalks, is much closer to the spirit of James Dean than James Dean. That desecration frequently reaches neorealist proportions - "it looks like the Serbian army came through here" - and would make the film feel more an urban documentary than a drama if Michael Caton-Jones' portrayal of Long Beach weren't so expressionist. Opening with a torrential downpour - the camera almost needs a windscreen wiper - Long Beach is imagined less as a city by the sea than a city in the sea, as if it had decayed enough to break off from the mainland entirely, or Long Island itself were on the verge of splintering into a series of keys. Certainly, Joey's nostalgia for the Florida Keys seems misplaced, just as the distinction between Long Beach and Manhattan ultimately seems false, as Caton-Jones devotes about the same amount of time to shoreline and street level, in a conflation of sidewalk and boardwalk that gives de Niro's trajectory the feel of swimming through incipient tears, towards his quite astonishing and uncharacteristic final monologue.