Jew Talkin' to Me?
Barry Levinson has said
that his new movie,
Liberty Heights
, was born when a magazine
critic made a breezily derisive reference to the Jewishness of Dustin Hoffman's
character in Levinson's dud sci-fi picture Sphere (1998). Why, he asked,
make an issue out of a character's ethnicity? The barbs of that (Jewish) critic
don't seem like such a big deal to this (Jewish) critic, but in Levinson they
clearly touched a nerve. Trounced a nerve, even. He has responded the way his
teen-age alter ego Ben Kurtzman (Ben Foster) and friends respond in Liberty
Heights when they defy a sign on a local pool that reads, "No Jews, Dogs,
or Coloreds Allowed." He's saying, "You got a problem with Jewish? I'll show
you Jewish!"
Does Levinson fully understand what teed him off?
The charismatic young men in Diner (1982), his first autobiographical
work (and his masterpiece), weren't labeled as Jewish, and its most memorable
turns were by actors named Kevin and Mickey. In his third on-screen visit to
his native Baltimore, Avalon (1990), the milieu finally was
Jewish, but the director was more interested in making sweeping points about
the cultural fragmentation of the central immigrant family--and, by extension,
the American family--than in exploring his tribal or religious roots. (That
family was impersonated by those Hebrews Aidan Quinn, Elizabeth Perkins, Armin
Mueller-Stahl, and Joan Plowright.) The point is: Levinson airbrushed the
Jewishness out of his movie memoirs, and that review must on some level have
shamed him--made him feel as if he'd been dodging the issue.
The problem, I think, is
that he's still dodging the issue. Levinson might be so assimilated by now that
he barely remembers what would impel someone to filter the Jewishness out of
his or her autobiographical alter egos. On the basis of the family depicted in
Liberty Heights , he hardly seems to remember what a Jew is--only what a
Jew is not. It's not a WASP. It's not an African-American. As a boy in the
exclusively Jewish Liberty Heights section of Baltimore, being Jewish was just
being ; it was when he perceived his "otherness," the movie suggests,
that a more complicated relationship to the world began.
That's what Liberty Heights attempts to recapture.
The movie opens in 1954, when 16-year-old Ben first pokes his head out of his
neighborhood and when desegregation is starting to bring together disparate
ethnic and racial groups. Jews are not only interacting with WASPs and blacks;
in the case of Ben and his older brother, Van (Adrien Brody), they're falling
for them--much to the horror of the older generation, both white and black. Ben
takes a shine to a "colored" girl (Rebekah Johnson), who sneaks him into her
(upper-middle-class) house and introduces him to rock 'n' roll and to comedians
who make fun of white people. Meanwhile, Van and his buddies crash a Halloween
party on the WASP side of town, where Van goes gaga for a chill blonde goddess
(Carolyn Murphy) in a fairy-godmother ensemble--the supreme shiksa. Even their
dad, Nate (Joe Mantegna), is forced to ally himself with non-Jews. The owner of
a dying burlesque house whose side business, the illegal numbers racket, has
become his lone source of income, Nate loses a fortune to a small-time black
drug dealer called Little Melvin (Orlando Jones)--a loose cannon who ultimately
threatens his livelihood and his family.
Levinson's remarks about
the review of Sphere --which was released only last year--suggest
something else about Liberty Heights : that it was written fast. That
might not be a problem if its canvas weren't so broad, but Levinson doesn't
work simply anymore. He wants to make an epic. So he spreads the narrative
thin, and the script plays like a first draft. It's full of wonderful bits that
don't mesh (some of them could be spun off into their own movies) and with
characters conceived either too coarsely or too vaguely. Little Melvin is a
flaming racist outrage, and I can't make any sense out of Trey (Justin
Chambers), a glamorous, rich WASP who's fond of crashing cars and who takes
such a liking to Van that he appears to be foisting his girlfriend--the blonde
goddess--on the Jew. Is this Aryan guilt, or does he really want to jump Van's
bones? No clue from the actors, who look uniformly marooned.
The crosscutting among the movie's various strands is even
weirder. While Van and his buddies comb wealthy neighborhoods for a glimpse of
his shiksa, Nate auditions a stripper whose costume doesn't arrive and who ends
up doffing her conservative street clothes on stage to wild acclaim. Is
Levinson drawing a parallel here--saying that Jews are turned on by WASPs
because they're so buttoned-up? (I think, alas, he is.) And when he crosscuts
between a James Brown concert and a WASP party is he saying that Jews are
turned on by blacks because blacks are so unbuttoned--because they shake,
rattle, and roll? (Ditto.) Is he saying that coming of age as a Jew means
learning to embrace both chocolate and vanilla?
In the end, the narrator, Ben, retreats into
generic memory-play mode: "If I'd known things would no longer be, I'd have
tried harder to remember them." Loss of the past--that's a universal theme, a
"gentile" theme. The director has backed away from what appears to be his real,
more local, theme, which is the tug of war within American Jews of his
generation between a compulsion to embrace other cultures and a feeling of
superiority toward them. That idea is hilariously embodied by his best
character, Van's friend Yussel (David Krumholtz), who starts a brawl when he
gets his nose rubbed in his Jewishness at one WASP party and shows up for the
next with his hair dyed blond and with a tale of Nordic ancestry. I wish there
were more of Yussel in Ben and Van, who are both unforgivably wide-eyed and
marshmallowy. Their blandness neuters what should be the movie's reason for
being.
Liberty Heights
is less gaseous than Avalon . The Jewish boys' exploration of life among
the "other kind" is often wryly funny, and when they show up at the familiar
Baltimore diner to compare notes, time stops and we bask in their banter. If I
sound sour compared with other critics, it's because I think Levinson missed a
chance to get something unique and audacious on screen: the story of a
thin-skinned Jewish kid who'd grow up to make autobiographical movies that
somehow leave out the Jewishness and then get so enraged by a critic's offhand
projection of Jewishness into a big WASPy sci-fi picture that he vows to go
back and remake his other films with Jews instead of gentiles. That would be
something to see.
Critics have been falling all over themselves to announce
that
All About My
Mother
marks Pedro Almodóvar's arrival
as a mature, world-class director. Not to take anything away from his
movie--it's a lovely work--but Almodóvar arrived as a world-class director 15
years ago, when his silly, campy, and impassioned melodramas were like joyous
dances on Gen. Franco's tomb. His new work is his most sober, maybe because his
alter ego--an 18-year-old devoted son, aspiring writer, and worshipper of
flamboyant actresses--gets run over by a car while chasing an actress (who'd
just played Blanche DuBois) for her autograph. This shocking act of
self-effacement paves the way for a film suffused by the boy's loss. His
grief-stricken mother (Cecilia Roth) goes off in search of the father the boy
never met--now an AIDS-ridden transvestite in Barcelona--and ends up at the
center of a benign matriarchal society that includes the very actress (Marisa
Paredes) that her son was pursuing.
The film has been consciously devised as the flip
side of All About Eve (1950)--as a tale of women not bitchily at one
another's throats but holding one another together through life's most
senseless tragedies. (The definition of women here is broad enough to include
transvestites and transsexuals.) Things that might once have been screamingly
campy are now played "straight": People dramatize their emotions but rarely
overdramatize them. And even though the film is full of laughs, the jokes hover
on the edge of the abyss: This is a world in which lurid colors and extravagant
gestures are means of filling the void.
Almodóvar's movies are
the transparent reveries of a gay, star-struck adolescent. Most of us have
equivalent fantasies, but we'd be ashamed to expose ourselves by putting them
out there. Almodóvar--even here, in his square, Douglas Sirk mode--gives them
the kind of soul that banishes embarrassment.
I'm embarrassed to admit it, but Pierce Brosnan is growing
on me. Ian Fleming's James Bond was a snob and a lightweight. It was only Sean
Connery's peculiar combination of traits--he could seem rugged and snooty at
once--that made us think 007 a more interesting character than he was. In
The World Is Not Enough
, Brosnan brings the right Flemingesque
irritation to the opening chase. Unlike Roger Moore, who seemed detached from
the action (as well as from his stunt double), and Timothy Dalton, who seemed
above it, Brosnan makes you believe that Bond's absurd feats are the plausible
upshot of his refusal to be bested by social or sexual inferiors. The actor is
still sleek, but the touch of crepe paper around his face has eliminated the
plastic, department-store-mannequin look that Remington Steele exploited
so shrewdly. He's vulnerable now: You don't want his sewn-on suit to get
wrinkled, because fine tailoring appears to be all this man has. He even winces
in pain a couple of times, and in the climax lets out a grunt that takes the
Bond girl (the dire Denise Richards) aback.
The movie is better than
you've heard, although that's not saying a lot. I confess I always want to like
the latest Bond flick. I have a Pavlovian reaction to the pre-title
black-white-and-red bit with Monty Norman's theme and the gun site roving over
the latest 007 as he saunters to the center of the frame--I go, "Kill 'em,
Bond!"
Much has been made of hiring Michael Apted to bring a more
human touch to the series. There's only so much a director can do with the most
ironclad formula in movies, but Apted's documentary instincts give the eastern
European locations more personality, and the dialogue scenes aren't as choppy
as usual: Brosnan and his co-stars actually get a rhythm going. There's even a
rare performance from one of the "Bond girls," Sophie Marceau, as a damsel in
distress who turns out to be very distressed--psychologically--by a
previous kidnapping attempt. Plus, she has a long, rounded chin that I find
mysteriously intoxicating.
The filmmakers drop the ball, though, on their
master villain, Renard, who has a bullet in his brain that renders him
impervious to physical pain. Robert Carlyle is a wonderful (and frightening)
actor, but the movie pumps him up to be such a terminator--"his only goal is
chaos, and he grows stronger every day until he dies"--that when this little
guy comes shambling on and turns out to be such a soulful twit, the movie loses
all its credibility. Apted might be too much of a humanist for a Bond picture.
It's not so bad that the blows aren't heavily amplified, but when the bad guys
get it there isn't that extra sadistic beat to let you know how surprised they
are that their aura of invincibility has been punctured. I kept thinking, "Kill
'em again, Bond!"
