City by the Sea; Barbershop
Beautiful as the young Robert De Niro was in The Godfather, Part II, 1900, New York, New York and The Deer Hunter, he has now gone beyond physical magnetism in City by the Sea and offers the beauty of recognition. He looks like the average men we know or see every day, but De Niro also lets us see inside them. As Vincent LaMarca, a Manhattan police detective who discovers the son he abandoned is now being hunted as a killer?and on top of that is also a junkie?De Niro dredges up an all-too-relevant contemporary pain and bewilderment. De Niro's talent for baring the common man's soul brings City by the Sea close to the great movie it should have been.
What a wonderful reminder this movie offers of how good De Niro can be; it's almost like rediscovering the combined newness and revelation of his 70s triumphs when his fresh talent matched the inquiries of brave, visionary directors like Coppola, Bertolucci, Scorsese and Cimino. That new magic can never come again, but City by the Sea matches some of the purposefulness of those movies in the way it examines a middle-aged father's dilemma; LaMarca's familial trial represents a larger, dismaying sense of social responsibility. LaMarca grew up suffering his own father's legacy and now worries about the world?and the personal example?he leaves to his son. It's a wonder this film's reviews have been so cruel; don't critics live in the modern world? Can't they relate to LaMarca's sense of helplessness and failure? De Niro makes LaMarca a man struggling to survive in the simplest sense?to manage his work life and salvage his emotional life. He has an undeclared romance with Michelle (Frances McDormand), a conscientious, avid woman who lives in his apartment building, and barricades his messy past?his conflicted self?from the negotiated peace they both share.
Michelle is LaMarca's lifeline; she doesn't just offer sex, she keeps him sane. But owning up to fatherhood is LaMarca's salvation. Critics who snipe at the film as being merely about "redemption" apparently don't know about salvation, and thus miss that the significance of LaMarca's story is not its Esquire origin but how his personal struggle extends to a greater social, spiritual endeavor. Your typical cop movie?or crap tv series about the gruff men of the NY or L.A. PD?all miss the moral nuances of how a man behaves ethically. De Niro gets it and roots it?in his plebian speech, rough face, wide waist, squinting eyes, his clearly drawn perseverance.
What's beautiful and romantic in this performance is also?simply?what's fundamental in the human struggle. No wonder critics object, after having rolled over for Road to Perdition where not a single second was credible. (A guy who works with his hands asked me if I'd seen "That new Paul Newman picture?you know, Return to Perdition." Bless him.) De Niro accomplishes what the usually estimable Newman and Hanks could not, given Sam Mendes' mendacity. De Niro's director Michael Caton-Jones shows a Kazan hankering to make City by the Sea as socially authentic as On the Waterfront. Free of 9/11 sanctimony, Caton-Jones appreciates the fact of New York City toughness and stays true to that vision even to the point of including background shots of the World Trade Center. I applaud Caton-Jones' refusal to erase history for the weak-minded; it's connected to De Niro's truth about LaMarca owning up to history and memory.
When LaMarca advises, "This is no game, son," the appellation resonates to the way fatherless boys in American cities now call each other "son," looking for models and anchors. Screenwriter Ken Hixon understands the depths of masculine role-playing. It's good drama that both LaMarca and son (well played by James Franco, updating the dereliction of Mean Streets' Johnny Boy) utter the same dismay when cornered: "That wasn't the real me," they say. It's better than the self-pitying line, "They don't get me," uttered as alibi in the specious The Good Girl. City by the Sea isn't nostalgic for proper families, nor is it indie-cynical about an idyllic America but is honest about modern circumstances. Its sense that one generation carries its fathers' sins onward, neglecting the next generation, is real. Something isn't connecting between generations that makes today's kids unreachable by their parents. De Niro conveys LaMarca's parental longing, touching on his conflicted social identity?as cop and father, citizen and man. Those divided/compounded obligations are poignantly evoked when De Niro laments never teaching his son "about music, good movies, not to be afraid to fight." Add sex to that agenda and you've got most people's working-class sophistication.
To the current moviegoing generation, De Niro's no more than a humorless schmuck?straight man to Billy Crystal and Ben Stiller. Or else they depreciate his featured parts in Goodfellas and Casino as merely Tony Soprano prototypes. Trouble is, today's debased audiences are unaccustomed to having their identification pushed past shallow reflexes. De Niro does not overemphasize cliche machismo or cliche ethnicity. Knowing gruffness is not the essence of any man, he's almost abashed. He makes everyday behavior extraordinary by making it clear?and without that self-congratulatory pride in belligerence that is the mark of tv-actor banality. (This decency also came through in A Bronx Tale, Flawless and 15 Minutes. In Copland he was merely bathetic.) Emotional fireworks don't make De Niro fascinating, it's the quiet colors and shadings with which he creates his characters, allowing us to understand our own temperamental movement from patience to anger, shyness to joy, or our lonely, brooding wisdom. De Niro's final scene, LaMarca playing with his grandchild, flips the script of Brando in the garden with his grandson at the end of The Godfather. It's here, rather than The Score, that De Niro shows his continuity with Brando's great humanism. It's not just fantastic coincidence. It's a gift.
When it comes to cultural heroism, Ice Cube has every other rapper-wannabe-movie-star beat. He is the only one to bring vernacular virtue from his records to the screen. His new film Barbershop isn't as good as The Players' Club (or the belatedly recognized Friday), but it has some of the same qualities?focusing on seldom-seen sides of black urban life. This time, a neighborhood barbershop where locals congregate and the world's problems drive by the storefront windows and sometimes walk through the front door. Cube plays Calvin Palmer, a young Chicago husband and father-to-be, who inherited the shop from his own father. It's another singular Cube characterization: Calvin's not quite likable yet he's likably familiar. With more entrepreneurial drive than community spirit, Calvin wants to sell the shop to become a musician. He also wants to get away from the freeloaders and riffraff who cadge off the little institution he's established. Calvin is the screen's first credible black Republican, although, to be more accurate, Cube plays him with the no-nonsense firmness of a man simply dedicated to self-preservation?and a foil to typical conservative critics of the hood. This confirms the integrity Cube showed when he played a troublesome thug in Players' Club and self-serving Craig in Friday. There's nervy honesty in his characterizations; begging audiences to assess his motives rather than seeking the usual pop star admiration. Cube's orneriness?and wit?make him more than a star, he's an artist.
Like De Niro, Cube draws his characterizations from the street (but I don't mean that bogus source of hiphop cliches that's endlessly referred to). Cube's and De Niro's antiheroic figures can only be observed when we look sharply at their circumstances and conditions. That is, they're conceived through their society. Calvin points to the subtle class divisions in a culture commonly assumed to have only one stratum. Each male and female barber in Calvin's employ represents a range of experiences, backgrounds and goals. Too bad they feel more functional than real. Director Tim Story never creates an Altman or Mike Leigh sense of spontaneous life, and the story by Mark Brown is overly contrived (including an unnecessary subplot with Anthony Anderson and a crony stealing an ATM machine?alluding to such activity would be folklore, returning to it constantly is sitcom). Barbershop can't disguise its synthesized roots: Shelley Garrett's traveling vaudeville Beauty Shop, Spike Lee's Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, Michael Schultz's Car Wash all the way back to Lonne Elder III's Negro Ensemble Company classic Ceremonies in Dark Old Men. Elder (who wrote the film Sounder) seriously explored ghetto economic ambition. The makers of Barbershop are content to entertain. They are implicitly satisfied with the comic vagaries of ghetto struggle, while Cube?bless him?suggests that darker ceremonies remain.