James Gandolfini was courted to play Ralph Kramden in the ill-fated 2005 big-screen version of “The Honeymooners” (Cedric the Entertainer got the part). Is it irony or coincidence that he ended up in a little indie shot in Keansburg, the sad, run-down little resort town on New Jersey’s Raritan Bay that was frequently mentioned in the original TV series?
Gandolfini acquits himself well in a rare big-screen lead as the depressed operator of a rinky-dink amusement park in the waning days of winter. He quietly yearns for his lifelong crush (Famke Janssen), long married to his business partner, a violent consumer of recreational drugs (Joe Pope, who also produced).
Director Harold Guskin and cinematographer Richard Rutkowski visually captured the quiet despair permeating an area that those of us who lived on the Atlantic shore proper sometimes referred to as “the armpit of New Jersey’’ around 2010, before it was devastated by Hurricane Sandy.
This compensates somewhat for veteran TV scribe Sandra Jennings’ cliché-ridden script, which wends its way to a foregone conclusion involving an easy-to-guess secret. The cast includes John Magaro, who played Gandolfini’s son in “Not Fade Away,’’ as Janssen’s mentally challenged offspring.