City Island

The Rizzos are a familyfull of secrets. Prison guard Vince (Andy Garcia) and his wife, Joyce (JuliannaMargulies), promised each other to quit smoking, but both sneak off to the shedfor a cigarette. Vince tells Joyce he’s playing poker with the boys when he’sreally attending acting classapparently an embarrassing thing to do in aworking-class Italian-American family. They don’t know that their daughter wassuspended from college and is working as a stripper until she can regain herscholarship, or that their teenage son is addicted to Internet images oflarge-size women.

And then comes the“secret of secrets,” as Vince calls it. His newest prisoner, 24-year-old Tony,is the son he abandoned at birth. Gaining Tony a release under his custody,Vince tells the family that he’s a handyman who’ll live in the shed for a fewmonths while doing work outside.

The pungent accents andsharp-elbowed dialogue of City Island, the latest film by director-writerRaymond De Felitta, suggests yet another crime story from New York’s mean streets. But after a shorttime the comedy surfaces. It’s not a laugh-out-loud movie until the climacticscene, a kind of Bronx standoff dressed up asbedroom farce. City Islandworks best as a gentle spoof of thosesteamy, dog-days movies about secrets and lies, crime and passion, set in thetightly packed core of the Big Apple.

The plot is slender butgains substance through superb acting from Garcia, who prowls like a wary,inarticulate animal in the manner of a younger Robert De Niro, and Margulies, afireplug of anger and repressed energy. Alan Arkin delivers an excellent cameoas the director of Vince’s acting class, especially during his attack on thepregnant pauses of Method actors such as Marlon Brando. “Why does he have tothink about it?” the director demands when one of his students slips into aMethod moment. “If you want to think, think in the privacy of your own home.It’s not acting.”

City Islandopens April 23 at the Oriental Theatre.