City island

Way back when, before there was a surfeit of oddball Jewish-American family comedy-dramas, there were Italian-American and then black-American comidramas galore. No other major ethnic genre emerged, and the probably inevitable Latino-American genre is yet to mutate in big numbers. We must await a crop of Latino film school graduates with production funds. A good role model for them will be City Island, writer-producer-director Raymond De Felitta's debut movie.

The black comedy of Italian-American manners stars co-producer Andy Garcia as a prison guard, who tells the audience that his home island, a small reality in the middle of the river in Bronx, comprises clam-diggers and mussel-suckers (native-born and immigrants). So does every community, and that's the charm of De Felitta's madcap romp: ignore the accents and the movie can be enjoyed as magical realism about an off-beat Everyman and his family of secrets and silly characters.

One also needs to ignore the wild incredibilities of coincidental happenings forming the plot's cobweb. Garcia's correctional services officer discovers his previously-unknown 24-year-old son (NYC model/actor/singer Steven Strait) at work, and takes him out of custody and into his home without revealing the secret relationship. His other big secret is attending acting classes (conducted by Alan Arkin) where he meets an Englishwoman (Emily Mortimer) with a secret. He hasn't told his wife (ER veteran Juliana Margulies) anything, and the audience has to try and believe that neither knows the other is also a secret smoker. Their snappy daughter (Garcia's real-life daughter, Dominik) is a secret stripper; their sassy son (Ezra Californication Miller) is a fantasist for fat females, one of whom lives next-door and operates a web-cam site and another is a schoolmate.

If that line-up sounds like a recipe for an Italian goulash, it is. Most of the time, it's a tasty broth of screaming fits, Catholic guilt, comic confusions and good old-fashioned ensemble acting. The end scenes find the whole ensemble standing on their kerbside marks, woodenly, and dining at their beachside table ebulliently (cue overhead crane shot) but that's how ethnic genre comidramas are supposed to end.

The movie is a calling card of competence and entertainment value for De Fellita, a New Yorker (of course) who's also a professional jazz pianist and composer. His second feature movie, due for release in 2011, is reportedly another NY-set comedy about marital infidelity. De Fellita is right to stick with a winning formula once more.