Word: levinson
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This was, of course, an illusion, maybe even a dangerous one. It is writer-director Barry Levinson's business in Liberty Heights to shatter that illusion, pick up the shards and rearrange them into a somewhat more realistic, though scarcely revolutionary, pattern. The result is a loose, lively, lovely film that enfolds everything in its embrace from the death of burlesque to the birth of rock 'n' roll, but is mostly concerned with the ways in which Jews, blacks and Wasps, most of them more puzzled than angry, take their first wary, halting steps out of ethnic isolation...
...setting is again the Baltimore, Md., of Levinson's youth, source of Diner, Tin Men and Avalon. This time his alter ego is a smart, sweet-souled teenager named Ben (Ben Foster) who, having lived all his life in a Jewish enclave, is astonished to discover that most of the world is not, after all, Jewish. That's particularly true of Sylvia (the uncannily cool, wise and beautiful Rebekah Johnson), who is one of the token blacks in his newly integrated school. Their relationship is handled with great delicacy; this is a friendship that yearns to be, deserves...
...somehow that doesn't matter. Neither does the fact that Levinson packs his movie with more melodrama--including Little Melvin's kidnapping of Ben and Sylvia from an early rock concert--than you would think it could hold. What's important is the casual, even digressive, movement of the piece. It plays like a memoir, not a conventional three-act movie. There's room here for Ben to shock his family by dressing as Hitler for Halloween, for a faux-naive stripper to electrify Nate's theater, for the strange power of a new-model Cadillac to cloud the mind...
Liberty Heights is the fourth in Barry Levinson's "trilogy" about his hometown of Baltimore, Md. After Diner (1982), Tin Men (1987) and Avalon (1990), he felt he had finished with tales about growing up in the city's Jewish neighborhood in the 1950s. But then an ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY review of his 1998 movie, Sphere, referred to Dustin Hoffman as a "noodgey and menschlike" Jewish psychologist. The racial stereotyping annoyed Levinson ("Nobody would say Mel Gibson was playing a Catholic industrialist in Ransom"), but it also got him thinking about his youth again. Rather than fume, he sat down...
Like the film's Ben Kurtzman, the young Barry Levinson thought the white bread he ate at a Gentile home was raw. ("Ours was always toasted!") Like Ben's father, his dad sneaked out of the temple on Rosh Hashanah to check out the new Cadillacs. But Levinson, 57, believes his film is more than simple nostalgia. "We have all these hate crimes today--the gay slaying in Wyoming, the man dragged to death in Texas, the shootings at schools." So, he says, what happened in Baltimore in 1954 is still sadly pertinent today...