City By The Sea

In City By The Sea Robert De Niro plays a Manhattan homicide detective, Vincent LaMarca. When it turns out that the murderer might have been his son, Joey (James Franco), whom he abandoned fourteen years earlier after a messy divorce, Vincent is forced to face his past.

The actual crime aspect of the film is secondary to its thematic concerns which, broadly speaking is about the sins of the father and their effects on their children, specifically their son. One can see how this would been of interest in its original form as a 1997 Esquire article, "Mark of a Murderer" by Michael McAlary but the screenplay is too literally illustrative of the issues (including a tabloid banner "Killer Gene") whilst Michael Caton-Jones’ direction only compounds the problem which becomes particularly obvious in the film’s climactic denouement by which point it becomes simply ham-fisted in its sentimentality.

Robert De Niro, looking like he’s headed into Gérard Depardieu’s Land of the Overweight is in his element as the conflicted father, torn between his identity as a cop and his feelings as a father but  James Franco stands out as his junkie son. Although the setting of Long Beach provides a fitting backdrop for this story of lost innocence the film is too neatly packaged to convince as real life drama, too cursory in execution to excite as a crime story.

 

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