City by the Sea

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City by the Sea is a 2002 feature film directed by Michael Caton-Jones and starring Robert de Niro, in which family and the problems of wayward youth are set against a man trying to break with his past.

De Niro plays a veteran street cop, the son of an executed killer. While his father didn't intend to kill the kidnapped child, the son reaps the reputation anyway and decides to be so good that he is beyond reproach. Meanwhile, his son, a drug user with fading memories of high-school athletic glory, gets wrapped up in a drug-related killing and asks his father for help. After a failed marriage and an estranged son suddenly come to the attention of de Niro's current girlfriend, she asks why he won't help his son. He has tried so hard to distance himself that he cannot accept any intrusion into his contentment. His son gets deeper into trouble when the local drug enforcer (played by William Forsythe) kills a cop looking to help de Niro clear his son's name, and the murder is pinned on the son. In the end De Niro sets aside his self-imposed isolation and helps, drawing the enforcer to him.

1 Artistic license
2 Reactions
3 Notes
4 External link

[edit] Artistic license

Though this film is based on a true story^[1], it is almost entirely fiction. The differences between the film and the events in real life are as follows:

Vincent LaMarca was a New York City police officer first, and a Long Beach police officer afterward; in the movie it is the opposite.
LaMarca's son did not kill a man in self defense. His son committed a cold blooded murder, stabbing a man over 60 times and nearly decapitating him.
LaMarca was not involved in the manhunt for his son. He had retired from the Long Beach police by that time.
The murder did not take place in Long Beach, New York. It happened in East Rockaway, a few towns over from Long Beach.
Lamarca's father did not accidentally kill an infant. He kidnapped the baby, walked into the woods with it, put it on the ground face down, and walked away, basically ensuring that the baby would die.
Long Beach, New York, is not the run down dilapidated community as portrayed in the film. All of the Long Beach scenes in the film were shot in Asbury Park, NJ. Long Beach is actually a very lovely, pleasant beachfront town. Even in its worst condition it was not as bad as portrayed as in the film.

[edit] Reactions

It is interesting to note that James Franco, who played Joey LaMarca, went to the Long Beach police station to introduce himself to the police officers there, and they were so enraged at the portrayal of Long Beach in the film that they kicked him out.