Lies, laughs reside on ‘City Island’

By Rene Rodriguez

Miami Herald

After starring in a string of heavy dramas, Andy Garcia lightens up and goes for the funny in “City Island,” a breezy comedy that fits the actor like a guayabera. Garcia stars as Vince Rizzo, the patriarch of a boisterous Italian-American family in the eponymous Bronx suburb whose members constantly lie to each other, until those lies snowball into a pile so large it can no longer be ignored.

Before then, though, Vince, a prison guard, is taking acting lessons but hiding them from his wife (Julianna Margulies), who thinks he’s having an affair. Their daughter, Vivian (Dominik Garcia-Lorido, Garcia’s real-life daughter), has dropped out of college and is moonlighting as a stripper. Their teenage son, Vinnie (Ezra Miller), has a fetish for overweight women. Also, everyone smokes cigarettes but claims they don’t smoke.

Written and directed by Raymond De Felitta, “City Island” maintains a brisk, farcical pace as Vince discovers he has an illegitimate son, Tony (Steven Strait), serving a stint in jail for car theft. Vince bails him out and moves him into the family garage without telling him their connection. The easygoing young man — who is the first to discover the depth of deceits inside the Rizzo household — serves as a catalyst for the plot, which gradually brings together a multitude of threads for one gigantic (and loud) family pow-wow.