Fri, January 17, 2003

Here's a mistake to avoid when you're making a movie with Robert De Niro in it. Don't make a movie with Robert De Niro in it. If, for some reason, you've become inextricably involved in making a De Niro movie, by all means don't make this mistake: don't surround him with spectacular performances that will only draw attention to the fact that you made mistake number one.

City By The Sea tells the story of police detective Vincent La Marca (De Niro) who has a punk kid son, Joey Nova (James Franco, astonishingly even more wooden and despicable than he was in Spider-Man) and an ex-wife who feels like he hasn't been a good father, partly as a result of his walking out on said son.

Comes the day when Little Timmy Nova is tangentially involved in a drugland murder and runs away from home for fear of being connected to the crime. Others interfere (including a character actually named Spider, played by William Forsythe on a motorcycle with a mullet, mistake number three), framing the punklet for this and related crimes, and because La Marca's own dad was a convict, it becomes harder and harder to believe that his son who was already a junkie and a dropout might be innocent. Don't go to this movie for the story.

Go because of mistake number two. Surrounding De Niro – acting circles around him, in fact – are Patti LuPone (the aforementioned ex), Frances McDormand (the new flame) and Eliza Dushku (the mother of Nova's son). These three fine actresses make such mincemeat of De Niro that you almost forget he's in the movie, which is what makes watching it so bearable. McDormand is gracefully engaging as Michelle, the upstairs neighbor with whom La Marca is spending time in order to quell his loneliness and the typical cop rage that comes from too many years on the job. McDormand manages, as she always does, to be subtly radiant. In the scene where La Marca has to explain to Michelle a few things about his past that he'd been keeping secret, McDormand gets more character out of a glance at her napkin than De Niro gets out of the entire scene. (I'm not exaggerating here; watch the scene.) And she just gets better from there. She ends up doing some nannying for Nova's unrealistically adorable baby boy, and just as she's really drawing you in with her performance the film decides to cut off that loose end with no resolution whatsoever.

LuPone (Tony award-winner and Mamet favorite) is underused, but hers is a small role. She oozes compassion at Little Billy Nova (in pretty much the only scene that brings us even close to identifying with the boy or pulling for him) and De Niro could learn a thing or two about playing angry and hurt from her performance in the scene where La Marca drops by to glare around and presume his son's guilt. Dushku also gets the short end of the screen-time stick, but she masters what little she's given to work with. Her heartbreaking struggle to remain independent while wanting nothing more than to be taken care of is reminiscent of similar roles in True Lies and Bye Bye, Love (both films made better by the fact that she was in them, which can also be said of Bring It On and TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer). But here, her circumstances are more dire, and she shines even brighter. She manages to do in a few short scenes what Franco can't pull off in the whole film – she makes us believe that someone who has made a seemingly endless string of bad (even stupid), self-destructive choices can still be a good and compassionate person.

The ladies absolutely capture the screen, and De Niro is just plain bad. He's almost somnolent through the entire film, pouting, sulking, and glaring into the middle distance. Even when he's reaching out to Little Frankie Nova, trying to save him from a boringly staged suicide-by-cop, there's no fire in him. And when the time comes for him to reflect on all the events of the movie and try to figure out if he truly can trust his son, we get to hear sound clips from the earlier scenes while De Niro fills the screen (you guessed it) staring into space. There's no mark of bad acting more prominent than when the filmmaker must start playing back audio to remind the audience of what is going through a character's mind. Too many weeks on the sets of Analyze This and Showtime have stripped De Niro of his ability to emote anything more complicated than "sneering."

Interestingly, director Michael Caton-Jones has also chosen to stage all of the police scenes as bland, robotic dioramas of protocol and procedure with seemingly no connection to the emotional thread of the film. This turns out to work in the movie's favor, because again it aids in the forgettability of De Niro's presence, but it makes for a disjointed ride because the more emotionally-charged civilian scenes seem to have even less holding them together. Again, don't go to this movie for the story.

It's a shame that De Niro has neither aged gracefully the way Jodie Foster has nor declined precipitously the way James Coburn has. He's still in "serious" movies, so he can't be completely ignored, but his abilities and his devotion have receded to the point where it's hardly worth it any more.

(DVD Freeze-Frame Tidbit: In scenes of De Niro sitting on his sofa toward the end of the film, you can make out the Godfather films on VHS in the cabinet to his right. The People's Choice Award for wittiest set decoration is as good as won!)

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