It isn’t at all surprising that Raymond De Felitta’s comedy won the audience award at last year’s Tribeca Festival. It is funny, clever, well performed by a practised cast headed by Andy Garcia and covers its lightweight nature with essential truths about family life.
Set on City Island, a rustic outcrop of the Bronx on the outskirts of New York City, it has Garcia as Vince, a prison officer who secretly takes acting classes presided over by Alan Arkin’s veteran drama coach. Vince tells his wife, Joyce (the excellent Julianna Margulies), that he’s at a weekly poker game; but she suspects a mistress.
Neither knows that their student daughter (Domink Garcia-Lorido) has left college to be a pole dancer, or that their teenage son (Ezra Miller) is watching computer porn.
None of them knows that the young prisoner Vince brings home (Steven Strait) on a month’s trial is, in fact, his own son from a long-ago liaison. Cue for a mundanely quarrelsome suburban family life to be turned upside down, especially when Vince meets a would-be actress at class (Emily Mortimer), who Joyce immediately thinks is the mistress.
The sequence in which Vince goes to an audition and looks like getting a small part in a Scorsese thriller is the best, while the screenplay in general is good enough to give a fine cast every chance. They take it with alacrity.
The feelgood ending is ridiculous with everyone coming together as if in some schmaltzy operetta. But what goes before is entertaining, and just shrewd enough to make any audience squint into their own family life and nod with recognition.
City Island
Cert: 12A
