“City Island” was written in a kind of fevered rush in the infamous month of September 2001. I was seized with the idea and, unlike any of my other scripts, proceeded without an outline, watching the pieces of the story fall into place with an odd inevitability. Indeed, the writing somehow felt more like a process of taking dictation from some unknown source as I rushed to keep up with what the characters were saying and doing and where they were going. When I was finished, I showed the script to a couple of trusted friends and advisers and waited nervously; my fear was that it was an overcaffeinated writing binge that made sense at the time but would provoke more head scratching than hand clapping.
But to my relief, people seemed to like it. Very few notes or complaints. Lots of enthusiasm. Since this was the first time in my many years of screenplay creating that I’d had an experience quite like this, I decided that this meant this would be the first time that making a movie out of a script wouldn’t be a teeth-pulling, gut-wrenching, blood-letting experience.
Of course, I write this eight years later with the movie coming out on March 19, so you can see that this last prediction didn’t exactly come true. Rather than leaping effortlessly into production, “City Island” instead lurched and tripped along, stumbling, farting and burping like a cinematic town drunk who never quite makes it home and irritates the crap out of everyone along the way.
The project acquired its first set of producers a year after the screenplay was done — two very nice guys with lots of good intentions, a little bit of option money and a killer case of “fear of photography,” a syndrome in which anything that appears to be a step forward is regarded with fear and loathing and must be immediately countered with two steps backward. Progress was inordinately slow — it took a year until I finally convinced them that the script was ready to submit to actors. We brought on ace casting director Sheila Jaffe (“The Sopranos,” “Entourage,” etc.) who I’d worked with on my previous films and we all went to Ca’Brea, a trendoid West Hollywood boite where we proceeded to loudly consider and discard names.
The first casting meeting on any project is, by far, the most enjoyable and delusional experience of the entire movie. You sit around tossing out famous name after famous name, roundly rejecting many or pretending to take others under careful consideration (“De Niro?” “Nah, too old!” “Pacino?” “Love him!” “Eric Roberts?” “Kidding!” etc.) The actual likelihood of getting one of the big names is not confronted at this early meeting — indeed, the sky’s the limit in the first cast meeting, with only our imaginations to stifle the proceedings. This is why you need a sharp casting mind like Sheila, who can tell you who is truly unlikely or uninterested in the kind of role you might be looking at them for. Or who takes forever to read, or won’t read without an “offer,” or who simply won’t do anything unless a mega-studio deal is being dangled.
So the question was: Who had the mix of star power and appropriateness for the role, to be our Vince Rizzo? A working-class man, not too old but old enough to be the father of two teenagers and an older son who he meets in the prison where he’s a correctional officer. A man with a tough exterior and a big heart that’s been frozen for too long. A man who secretly yearns to bring out his inner artist — his true ambition, which he’s embarrassed by, is to be an actor. Who could possibly convey all these qualities, be serious, funny and emotional at the same time and deliver enough “marquee value” to help get the movie financed?
Yes, yes, I know the answer: Andy Garcia! But for reasons that I’ll never comprehend, his was not a name that we first considered. Why, I don’t know. We got stuck thinking that Vince had to be an Italian actor — De Niro, Pacino, John Turturro, Stanley Tucci, James Gandolfini. These were the names we were throwing around that day at Ca’Brea. And in the end, we decided on our first submission. We sent the script to one of everyone’s favorite Italian-American actors.
Michael Chiklis?
I knew Michael Chiklis from his then-newish show, “The Shield,” as well as his turn playing Curly Howard in a surprisingly good TV biopic about the Three Stooges. His acting was dynamic, he was tough, and he also had a pathos that I thought might make him a good Vince Rizzo. He was Greek, not Italian, but who cared, really? The other thing I liked about him was that, while he was certainly well-known, he wasn’t a mega-over-the-top-super-duper-A-list movie star. In other words, we stood a good chance of getting a fairly quick reaction as to whether or not the script was for him.
And we did. Almost immediately we got word from his agent that he really liked it! Never before in my career has the first actor I’ve sent something to evinced immediate interest.
Michael and I met and liked each other quite a bit. I saw a version of Vince Rizzo in the man — tough, demanding and also sweet, funny and a bit … insecure, perhaps? Michael had recently lost a lot of weight and undergone a kind of image makeover to become the star of “The Shield.” This was clearly somebody who went after what he wanted in life — and he was unabashed at telling me that he loved Vince Rizzo and wanted to be in my movie.
I flew back to New York and reported on my meeting to my producers. And they were happy too. Kind of. But I began to sense a reserve coming from them. Every time we spoke about the female roles, the names they were suggesting got bigger and bigger. What about Meryl Streep as his wife? What about Cate Blanchett as Molly, his friend in the acting class with whom he shares his big secret? Aside from the fact that most of the names didn’t really seem right for the roles, they also seemed — somehow lopsided. Like our $3 million movie with a respected TV name in the lead was teetering one way, while being overloaded on the opposite end with star power it probably couldn’t accommodate.
Ultimately, though, I began to sense that the problem was one of expectations. You see, nobody really expects the first person you offer a movie to take it. Once Michael said yes, I think my producers began to wonder along these lines: “If the first guy who we tried loves it, maybe we can get…” And the names start swirling about: De Niro! Bruce Willis! John Travolta! You name it.
Well, humans are human, and oftentimes we have trouble accepting good fortune. While I really liked Michael and kept pushing to get the movie started by the upcoming break in his TV schedule, my producers seemed to be sliding in the other direction. Things got slower, the budget seemed to be getting smaller, and more and more impossible names were added to the female roles list, and soon Michael Chiklis — no dummy he — began to get a whiff that something was not going right. Who could blame him for being a little pissed? We offered him a movie, he said yes, the director wanted him, and suddenly the whole thing seemed to lose momentum. Then he was offered a part in “The Fantastic Four” and, of course, he took it. That was that. We’d lost his window … and his interest.
I was depressed. We’d somehow torpedoed an opportunity that we’d created. Now we had to start all over again. My producers didn’t seem daunted. After all, the first time out of the box we scored. How hard would it be to get a Vince Rizzo? Let’s go to the agencies and try to land a big tuna! Travolta! Willis! Brad Pitt! Why not one of them?
A year later, we were still waiting for our calls to be returned.
So what was the inflated Academy Awards best-picture category, expanded this year from five to 10 nominees, going to bring us? More populism or more existentialism? Was it going to open the door to animated films, to fantasy and science fiction, to foreign flicks and low-budget indies — or just to middle-of-the-road Hollywood sentimentality, calibrated to draw in heartland viewers who’ve increasingly tuned out the whole Oscar spectacle?
Given the Academy’s catholic desire to please all its contradictory and overlapping constituencies, it shouldn’t have surprised anyone that the answer was all of the above. And yet, somehow, it did. I think of the five extra nomination slots as the “Dark Knight” apology awards, but this year offered no exact TDK-cognate, i.e., no commercial-critical behemoth likely to be snubbed by the Academy members’ peculiar blend of middlebrow snobbery. (Just to be clear: I didn’t like “The Dark Knight” much, personally. But that’s irrelevant when it comes to the Oscars. Given its alleged seriousness, cultural impact and box-office firepower, a best-picture nom should have been automatic.)
So along with the predictable passel of nominations (nine apiece) for James Cameron’s “Avatar” and ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker” — and I’m calling the divorce settlement here and now: Jim gets best picture; Kath gets best director — the Academy spread the love in all directions. Disney/Pixar’s “Up” was nominated for both best picture and animated feature. The family-football-Sandra Bullock vehicle “The Blind Side,” which has made a ton of money while leaving bicoastal critics in glycemic shock, also got multiple nominations. Lee Daniels’ “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire” got a best-picture nod along with two major acting nominations. The exquisite British female-coming-of-age film “An Education” was nominated for best picture, in a mild surprise, alongside a fully expected best-actress nomination for its irresistible ingénue star, Carey Mulligan.
In garnering best-picture and best-director nominations for his unspellable and borderline-unwatchable World War II pastiche, Quentin Tarantino becomes this year’s winner of the Martin Scorsese Way Too Late award, handed out annually to a director whose more worthwhile work has been largely ignored by the Academy. (Q.T. shared a screenwriting Oscar for “Pulp Fiction” in ’95.) In other news, it’s mighty peculiar that hardcore New Yorkers like Joel and Ethan Coen have become beloved figures in Hollywood, but there can no longer be any doubt. Their brilliant black-comic fable “A Serious Man” — a movie that gleefully and maliciously embraces the old cliché about being “too Jewish” for mainstream America — got a well-deserved nomination. But that surely wasn’t the big surprise among the gang of 10.
In a dinner conversation with critics last week at Sundance, we all agreed that one film among the best-picture nominees would be something nobody had expected. I remember a few possibilities mentioned: Wes Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” Pedro Almodóvar’s “Broken Embraces,” Steven Soderbergh’s “The Informant!” But of course once we’d mentioned them, they weren’t unexpected anymore, were they? Nobody brought up “District 9,” the sci-fi action-allegory made by South African expat Neill Blomkamp under Peter Jackson’s production aegis, which became a surprise late-summer hit. (Dept. of complicated Hollywood dis: The movie made by Jackson’s little-known protégé gets an Academy nod, while Jackson’s own prestige production, “The Lovely Bones,” pointedly does not.)
This year’s acting nominations ran remarkably true to form, leaving all the favorites in place: George Clooney and Meryl Streep in the leading roles; Stanley Tucci and Christoph Waltz fighting it out for the evil-guy supporting actor prize, and Mo’Nique all by herself, vacuuming some shelf space in the den for that statuette. Yes, I can hear the grumbling from the cinephile margins: Clooney was better in “Fantastic Mr. Fox” than he was in “Up in the Air”; Penélope Cruz was way, way better in “Broken Embraces” than she was in the musical megaflop “Nine”; the year’s best female performance, given by Tilda Swinton in French director Érick Zonca’s “Julia,” was never even on the Academy’s radar. Sure, yes, I agree on all counts. But when Zonca’s movies start showing up on the Oscar telecast, winning Oscars, it won’t be on NBC or ABC or A&E or any other TV network; it’ll be Web-streamed live from the back room of a Hollywood Boulevard liquor store in the middle of the night. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! That’ll be cool in kind of a different way.
I’ll consider the more niche-oriented nominations in due course, but my initial reaction is that the Academy has now avoided total disgrace in the foreign-language and documentary categories for two years running, which is an all-time record. “The Cove” and “Food, Inc.” were obvious documentary nominees, but it’s a wonderful surprise to see Anders Østergaard’s “Burma VJ” on the list. A thrilling and inspiring film largely shot by anonymous contributors inside Myanmar, it documents the doomed popular uprising against the Burmese military junta in 2007 — truly a one-of-a-kind viewing experience. It’s true that French New Wave foremother Agnès Varda’s delightful, autobiographical “The Beaches of Agnès” was left out, but you can’t call that a shocker.
Instead of the customary blend of cynical and/or sentimental foreign-language glop, this year’s Academy list includes at least two films, Michael Haneke’s “The White Ribbon” and Jacques Audiard’s still-unreleased “A Prophet,” that are clearly among 2009′s finest examples of world cinema. (I still haven’t seen the Israeli-Palestinian collaborative project “Ajami,” but I hear it’s terrific too.) Any lingering controversies in this category, such as the absence of Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s explosive “Il Divo” or Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s “Mother,” predate Tuesday’s announcement by weeks or months.
That sound you hear now and then in the post-middle-age romantic comedy “It’s Complicated” — something like the creaky cracking of a large frozen land mass whose surface has begun to melt just the tiniest bit — is the sound of Nancy Meyers having a sudden realization: Men are people, too. At least sometimes, if they happen to catch you in the right mood, maybe if they’ve just given you a good time in bed. The rest of the time, they’re the Enemy, particularly if you’re over 40 and still smarting over the cruel revelation that younger women exist. And that some (though not all) older men want them, perhaps more than they want you. Time to put on your mail-order art-to-wear kimono, pour another glass of chardonnay, and get together with your equally bitter girlfriends, all of whom have much to say about how much they hate everything with a penis, although once in a while — logic be damned — it would be kind of nice to touch one again.
I’m trading in stereotypes, of course. But compared to Nancy Meyers, I fear my characterization has the delicacy of Chekhov. “It’s Complicated” gives us Meryl Streep as Jane, a successful 60-ish cafe owner and mother who, some 10 years earlier, was dumped by her husband, Jake (Alec Baldwin), for a willowy swimsuit-model-type named Agness (played by Lake Bell). The divorce was rough, but in recent years, Jane has been doing just fine. Her children are grown. (They’re played by Zoe Kazan, Hunter Parrish and Caitlin Fitzgerald, with “The Office’s” John Krasinksi hovering on the sidelines as the way-too-nice future son-in-law.) Her business is thriving. And she’s just about to put an addition onto her already Architecture Digest-caliber house, maybe because, in Hollywood terms, that’s what real women do to prove they’ve fully gotten over being dumped for a younger woman.
And then Jake and Jane, while attending their son’s graduation festivities, get drunk together, share a few laughs and fall into bed. Jake begins to realize how much he’s missed his ex-wife; Jane starts wondering if perhaps she gave up on the marriage too soon. The two begin a clandestine affair that challenges how they think about each other as fellow grown-ups, and how they think about themselves.
Or at least, that’s the idea “It’s Complicated” gets at in its best moments. (I’ll have to get to Steve Martin’s character, as the emasculated nice-guy architect Adam, later.) Every few years Meyers graces us with another missive from romantic-comedy hell, and often (though not always) these movies end up being huge hits: In the 2000 film “What Women Want,” we were invited to howl with laughter at the sight of Mel Gibson suffering the indignity of having to wear pantyhose. In the 2003 effort “Something’s Gotta Give,” wrinkly poonhound Jack Nicholson got thrown for a loop by a very sexy Diane Keaton (who gave a marvelous performance that saved the movie). Meyers’ last picture, “The Holiday” (2006), was based on a potentially pleasing premise — lonely singles Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz swap homes for the holidays and in the process find nice boyfriends — but didn’t shoot through the box-office roof as Meyers’ previous pictures had.
Meyers writes these comedies not so much in the English language as in a broad semaphore that’s based largely on the idea of women as lonely, put-upon creatures who suffer because men can never, ever understand them. Long gone are the days of Preston Sturges, Howard Hawks, Ernst Lubitsch or even the early (and wonderful) Woody Allen. Those directors, although they were men, didn’t make comedies from a strictly male point of view (whatever that might be). In their movies, the sexes were doomed to misunderstand and misread one another; if they got together, it was by luck and a streak of go-for-broke insanity. Both parties, male and female, risked rejection and heartache.
But times have changed, and so have the terms of romantic-comedy filmmaking. Meyers is relatively rare in that she’s a woman who specializes in the genre, which supposedly makes her specially keyed in to a woman’s point of view. And watching “It’s Complicated” I felt, for the first time, that Meyers was willing to go just a little bit beyond her usual two-dimensional male-bashing — that for once, she was recognizing that marriages, and the families they create (whether that’s a family of just husband and wife or one that includes children) are more enduring and valuable things than we care to admit, particularly after a marriage disintegrates.
Perhaps I’m just projecting my own longing for thematic subtlety onto Meyers’ generally ham-fisted methods, but I don’t think so: There are moments in “It’s Complicated” — tied, particularly, to Baldwin’s performance and to some of the writing Meyers has done for him — where I think Meyers is grappling with some very real and very complicated feelings, instead of just delivering her usual cheap vision What (She Thinks) the Audience Wants.
She does have some skilled actors to work with here. Streep is always wonderful in comedy, and if she’s maybe a little too gung-ho about channeling Meyers’ pulsing “poor little old me” vibe, she does at times elevate the material. It doesn’t hurt that Streep is simply beautiful to look at. She and Baldwin are like movie-star versions of real people — prettier, most likely, than you and me, but still safely in the realm of the believable, with realistically imperfect skin and bodies that suggest an enjoyment of food or the experience of having borne children. Streep’s timing is pinpoint perfect, even when the dialogue she’s been given is offensive or stupid. And in places, Meyers has actually given her good dialogue to work with: In one scene, after Jane and Jake have tentatively reconnected, she lounges in the bath — on this particular occasion she’s refused to have sex with him, despite his pleading — while he sits with his back against the tub, rambling about nothing much at all. She’s sensed he isn’t happy, for obvious reasons, and she asks him plainly what’s going on at home — not as a way of belittling him, but in the way any of us might reach out to someone we truly cared about.
But elsewhere Streep is saddled with the usual Meyers crap: In the movie’s opening scene, she looks on with superiority as Lake Bell’s character struts around in a midriff-baring outfit. In later scenes, Jane gets together with her girlfriends (played by Mary Kay Place, Rita Wilson and Alexandra Wentworth) to bitch about how unworthy men are to spend time in the company of goddesses like them, though goddesses like these make Macbeth’s three witches look like real keepers. Jane’s self-pity is written right into her character’s DNA, and it has a screechy self-righteousness. Her unhappiness is everyone else’s fault. Near the end of the picture, after she and Jake have come to a decision about their possible future, he says, “I’m sorry,” and she asks how far back that “I’m sorry” goes. When he lays his soul bare, she can’t resist stabbing it with her ever-present hot poker.
There is one really nice guy in “It’s Complicated,” one who hasn’t cheated or hasn’t — yet — made any woman feel bad about herself, and he’s played by Steve Martin. The casting is unfortunate: I think Martin’s Adam is supposed to be handsome and sweet, but Martin’s skin is stretched so tight that he resembles a creepy snowman with two black coals for eyes. Maybe the old Steve Martin is somewhere inside there, but who wants to chip away the plaster to find out?
And now I’m about to lay one last horrible piece of news on those of you who may have at one point seen a Nancy Meyers’ movie and sworn, “Never again.” Alec Baldwin is off-the-charts superb. That’s probably no surprise to anyone who’s been watching him on “30 Rock” these past few seasons. In places he seems to be sending up the whole movie with his sexy, ever-so-slightly sleazy demeanor, though in the end, he’s the movie’s most believably human, and most sympathetic, character. At one point, after he and Jane have had sex, he rises from the bed to put his clothes on, standing before her in tight black shorts, his belly hanging unapologetically over the waistband. He pats this Buddha-like girth, drawing attention to it instead of hastening to cover it up, and in that moment he’s sexier than Johnny Depp, Robert Downey Jr. and James Franco all rolled into one.
I can already hear the chorus: Older men can afford to be more comfortable with their bodies! Society doesn’t judge them as it judges women! And there is some truth to that refrain, as there is to most refrains. Streep’s Jane is understandably nervous about showing Jake her older, softer body — she explains, shyly, that the last time he saw it, she was still in her 40s. That’s not a self-pitying remark, simply an honest one.
But Jane doesn’t get as naked, literally or figuratively, as Jake does in “It’s Complicated.” In Nancy Meyers’ world, the man — especially the cheating husband — will always be the Other, the villain who’s worthy only of women’s scorn, not their understanding. That said, I’m grateful to Meyers for giving us the sight of Baldwin in his underwear, for acknowledging even in some small way that guys have insecurities too, even if they don’t air them as vocally as women do. It’s a drag that “It’s Complicated” isn’t nearly complicated enough, but at least Meyers has dropped something a bit more subtle than her usual anvil. This one is more like a mere tire iron, but at least we’ve got Baldwin: He’s the pixie dust that chases away the ensuing headache.
Michael Chiklis almost played the lead role in "City Island" (photo illustration). 
Stills from "Precious," "Avatar" and "Up" 
Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin in "It's Complicated" 
