AVALON
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1990 Frank Maloney
AVALON is the third in Barry Levinson's Baltimore trilogy, which began with DINER and continued with TIN MEN. What links the three movies is setting (Baltimore), time (late 40's to early 60's), and feeling (love, compassion, sadness, nostalgia, &c).
They are very personal films and in some ways AVALON is the most personal of them all. The title is the name of a street in the row-house neighborhoods of working-class Baltimore. And a ball room. (And maybe all that Arthurian stuff lurking in the background. Now I once lived on Santa Catalina Island and Avalon brings up memories of a slightly different for me, but that's my movie, ain't it?)
AVALON is one those multigenerational movies that jumps a lot of decades, jumbles up a lot of characters, and is often a disorganized mess. Fortunately, in this case, Levinson uses several devices to hold the movie together, even though it is still too long and unfocused. One device is the narrative focus, which is primarily the character of Sam Kripinsky, who "came to America in 1914." It was the most beautiful place" he had ever seen (to quote Sam's oft-repeated story. Sam goes from a young man in the prime of his youth all the way through a semi-senile oldster waiting to die. Sam is played by Armin Stahl-Mueller and brilliantly; his wife is wonderful and hilarious Joan Plowright, who was the major delight in another movie this year as the mother-in-law of the philanderer whom everyone is out to kill (can't dredge it up, sorry!).
Another device for unity is the return through the decades to those most American of holidays, the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving. The changing face of America is clearest is the changing faces of these holidays. And it's pretty sad, I must say.
The third device is TV. Once the first TV set is turned on, there is a set in every room, it seems, these play out their lives in.
This is a sweet, powerful movie about who we Americans are and how we got this fucked up.
--
Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney
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