September 4, 2002

By Cheryl Eddy

FORGET ORIGINAL IDEAS – every other movie these days is based on, or inspired by, a true story. But even A Beautiful Mind's John Nash might be given a start by the trials of retired Long Beach, N.Y., police officer Vincent LaMarca. In 1958, when LaMarca was just 11, his father, Angelo, was executed at Sing Sing for accidentally suffocating a month-old baby he had kidnapped in a desperate ploy to raise money. Then, some 40 years later, Vincent's son, Joey – a drug addict who was obsessed with Angelo's case and harbored some elaborate theories about a "murder gene" – killed a dealer in Long Beach, a onetime seaside haven that has since become a crumbled ghost town.

First in an Esquire magazine article titled "Mark of a Murderer," by Mike McAlary, and now in a film called City by the Sea, by Michael Caton-Jones (Rob Roy, This Boy's Life), the saga of the LaMarca family unfolds like a grittier, uncampy version of The Bad Seed, with a "good" middle generation sandwiched between an older one and a younger one that are capable of terrible things. That son Vincent (played in the film by Robert De Niro) became a hero cop adds the kind of ironic element so juicy it could only be real life. City by the Sea twists the knobs a little tighter by making the fictionalized LaMarca a still-active NYPD homicide detective who, at first without realizing it, investigates a crime committed by his own, estranged son (James Franco).

True, the charms of Meet the Parents cannot be denied, but it's nice to see De Niro hasn't completely downshifted into comedy. Like last year's The Score, City by the Sea casts him as an introvert who is expert at his occupation and who holds back emotionally from a woman he's lucky to have (in City, it's downstairs neighbor Michelle, played with no-nonsense sweetness by Frances McDormand). LaMarca has good reason to resist closeness, as he's terrified of unleashing the pain he's so meticulously locked out of his life – caused by the loss of his father at a young age while also being branded a killer's kid, and later the bitter dissolution of his marriage to Margaret (Patti LuPone) bitterly dissolve. Then, of course, there's Joey, the child LaMarca abandoned when the divorce sent him roaring out of Long Beach for good – or so he thought, until the body of a tattooed man with a Long Beach address in his pocket washes ashore in LaMarca's jurisdiction.

Though it's got plenty of cops and crooks (including a pair with the distracting, clichéd monikers Spider and Snake), City by the Sea is not really a crime thriller and, unlike the article on which it was based, not really a study of whether or not the tendency to kill is hereditary. City suggests that circumstances, like Angelo's hunger for money and Joey's hunger for drugs, make murderers, while of course pointing out that Vincent's absence from Joey's life has played a large part in sinking the lad to smack-fevered lows.

Franco, an interesting young actor who collected a Golden Globe for TNT's James Dean and smarmed his way through Spider-Man as Peter Parker's on-off pal Harry Osborn, here turns in a somewhat predictable (as in, seemingly based on every other junkie who has appeared in films since the dawn of time) interpretation of the troubled Joey. Haggard, sweaty, and coming off like a cross between Sid Vicious and Dracula, Joey lurks around Long Beach's boardwalks, abandoned, graffiti-strewn casinos, and amusement rides. After his oops-I-was-so-fucked-up-I-stabbed-that-guy transgression, he dreams, Ratso Rizzo-like, of escaping to a Florida paradise (though one suspects he's simply dreaming of returning to his childhood, when Mom and Dad loved each other and Long Beach was, as Vincent remembers, "a real nice place").

The fact that Long Beach's optimistic nickname is the title of the film is no coincidence – the broken-down town (the movie was actually filmed in Asbury Park, N.J.) serves as a pretty obvious metaphor for the broken-down relationships in the film. Caton-Jones keeps the Long Beach scenes gray and dreary, a desolate landscape that's note-perfect for the inevitable confrontation between detective and quarry, father and son. Franco blusters a bit, and the filmmakers' decision to add a fourth LaMarca generation (Joey's son, Angelo ... get it?) is a little overwrought. But the compelling true story and De Niro's controlled, slowly unraveling performance render City by the Sea more haunting than expected.