LIBERTY HEIGHTS
Reviewed by Harvey Karten Warner Bros./ Baltimore/Spring Creek Pictures Director: Barry Levinson Writer: Barry Levinson Cast: Adrien Brody, Ben Foster, Orlando Jones, Bebe Neuwirth, Joe Mantegna, Rebekah Johnson, David Krumholtz, Justin Chambers, Carolyn Murphy
One of the miracles of the movies is that they can take us to unfamiliar places, locations and states of mind that we would not be able to reach under our own power. Yet you can't deny that there's a comfort to watching films about neighborhoods with which we're familiar and people who look, think and act mostly like us. "Liberty Heights" is particularly appealing to me for this latter reason, displaying performances by people who came of age at the time I did and belong to the religious faith with which I identify. In my Brooklyn community of Borough Park, everyone was Jewish, or, everyone except Jo Jo Carlino who lived across the street and who acknowledged that he hung out only with Jewish kids. Though we might never circumnavigate the globe, every guy suffered the embarrassment of the bris early on and every kid suffered bar mitzvah lessons at the appropriate age. No wonder I could look at "Liberty Heights" and remark, "Hey, that's me up there on the screen!"
Barry Levinson, best known for his series of movies about growing up in Baltimore, now presents the fourth in that progression. Few other directors can match Levinson's feel for the grit and humor and pathos of medium-sized metropolises that have none of the plastic ambiance of L.A. Nor can most others compete with his affection for the flawed residents of these areas. His "Diner" was about young people hanging around with one another, but "Liberty Heights" has an added dimension, a greater resonance. Most people who did not live through the period think of the fifties era of this movie as the dull decade, embracing an America that needed the sort of liberation granted to it by the characters David and Jennifer in Gary Ross's"Pleasantville." Looked as a safe and secure but altogether hokey Father Knows Best/Ozzie-and-Harriet period, the fifties were actually a prelude to the more dramatic and often violent civil rights movement of the sixties, all brought to a vehement head by the Vietnam War (memorialized in Levinson's "Good Morning, Vietnam"). The Supreme Court decision in 1954 calling for the integration of all public schools may not have succeeded to this day in combining the races in the field of education, but it was the foot in the door that got many people of diverse races, religions and ethnic groups out of their enclaves to make the first gingerly steps toward mixing and getting to know one another.
In 1954 Levinson was twenty-two, just a few years older than the folks he focuses upon in "Liberty Heights." As the film's editor, Stu Linder, keenly binds together several divergent scenes, moving back and forth and yet always clearly showing the relationships of the people photographed by Chris Doyle, we look in on the lives of some Jewish kids who hang out, speculating as persons their age have always done about young women, and making the first steps toward learning about those of other cultures. Traveling to Europe and cross-country was not yet in fashion, so to the Kurtzmans who lived in the Liberty Heights section of Baltimore, the whole world was Jewish.
Levinson sets the comic tone for the piece with a succession of shticks before settling into a deeper, though generally light tone. We are introduced to the provincial Bubby of the family, Rose (Frania Rubinek), parents Ada and Nate Kurtzman (Bebe Neuwirth and Joe Mantegna) and to their children Van (Adrien Brody) and Ben (Ben Foster). Ada indoctrinates her kids that gentiles are "the other kind," allowing us to make obvious inferences that "the other kind" must refer to Jews as "the other kind" as well. In fact the youngsters soon take note of the outside world when they see a sign on a country club fence just outside their neighborhood, "No Jews, Dogs or Colored Allowed." When the fellas attend a Halloween party in the other section of town, Van is fascinated by his view of "shiksa goddess," Dubbie (Carolyn Murphy) dressed in a Cinderella costume. Through an unusual, somewhat contrived turn of events, Dubbie's WASP boy friend, Trey (Justin Chambers), sets the stage for the two to meet and date. But the more fascinating tale involves the tentative courtship of Ben with the first black student he had seen in his classes, Sylvia (Rebekah Johnson), a young woman who defies all of Ben's stereotypical attitudes toward "Negroes."
In a separate development of this interwoven yet wonderfully linked story, Van and Ben's dad, Nate, is affected by the changes of the fifties in a more lamentable way. Burlesque is dying out. The strip-tease house he owns is going under and what's more, the numbers racket that he controls suffers a cataclysmic loss that threatens the entire future of his family, as Little Melvin (Orlando Jones) is about to take over the remainder of Nate's livelihood.
"Liberty Heights" stands out not only because of its uncanny ability to capture a turning point in America's social history but because Levinson, aided by ace cameraman Doyle, captures some sensational scenery: a full house attending a Rosh Hashanah service in the neighborhood synagogue featuring the mellifluous tones of a Baltimore cantor; a rollicking concert in the local theater featuring soul idol James Brown (Carlton J. Smith), which introduces Ben and his friend Sheldon (Evan Newman) to stirring music with which they had no familiarity; even a terrific strip-tease on the stage of Nate's burlesque house highlighting an exotic dancer who goes further than her boss would have liked her to go.
The fifties are shown as a time that a mere conversation between a white boy and a black girl could be a topic of gossip, and any fraternizing between the races would be the subject of chastisement by unliberated parents of both groups. For all his education, even Sylvia's dad, a prosperous physician, is horrified by the thought that his daughter invites a young white man to his home simply to listen to records.
Andrea Morricone's score of 40 the great popular songs of the era punctuates on-target performances by rising star Adrien Brody (who took on an altogether more sinister role in Richard Shepard's not-to-be-missed "Oxygen") and a terrifically believable chemistry between Rebekah Johnson and Ben Foster as the daring duo of inter-racial friendship. David Krumholtz as Yussel, another of the Kurtzmans' friends, pumps up the humor, particularly when he attends a WASP party with bleached-blond hair and cons a gentile girl into thinking that his father and mother, from Norway and Denmark, met and married in Sweden. "Liberty Heights" is an all-around rollicking piece of entertainment.
Rated R. Running Time: 127 minutes. (C) 1999 Harvey Karten
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