Review of City Island (2009) by Cine M — 08 Jan 2011
CITY ISLAND is the flip side of the coin on which Bobcat Goldthwait's SLEEPING DOGS LIE resides, a film about the love behind the pretty lies, whereas CITY ISLAND is about lies told to love ones that go into a tail spin and cause meaningless emotional chaos and destruction, albeit in a humorous manner.
Andy Garcia, one of America's great acting talents, plays a prison guard who keeps his ambitions to become an actor hidden from his wife, as well as the illegitimate child he had with a previous lover.
His son secretly admires big beautiful women, and wants nothing more than to feed them. His daughter lost her college scholarship, and works a stripper to make the money to go back to school, hoping her parents never notice.
His wife thinks he's cheating on her, has taken up smoking, and secretly admires the new man in their house, who she has no idea is really her stepson. The secrets grow from those seeds to create massive misunderstanding.
CITY ISLAND has all the predictable moments of misunderstanding seen in thousands of films that have come before it, but it succeeds as an rich family narrative rife with emotion and characters that are loud-yet-nuanced.
An unsung film of 2010, CITY ISLAND is one of cinema's delightful seemingly-small pleasures that provides more than the promised.
This review of City Island (2009) was written by Cine M on 08 Jan 2011.
City Island has generally received positive reviews.
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