AN AMERICAN RHAPSODY PG-13, 106 minutes Written and Directed by Eva Gardos WHEN, WHERE Now playing at the De Vargas
At a '50s California backyard barbeque to celebrate the family's reunion with 6-year-old Suzanne (Kelly Endresz Banlaki), who was separated from her parents at infancy and raised behind the Iron Curtain, her father proposes a toast : `America – the greatest country in the world!' It's a perspective we appreciate today with special poignancy, as the Stars & Stripes fly from our porches and flutter from our cars.
Eva Gardos, the writer/director of this autobiographical film, traveled a difficult road to her appreciation of this country. In fact, it wasn't even this country to which her family fled from communist Hungary in the early Fifties. They came to Canada, but Canada has a smaller movie market, so the cinema version of her family wound up in southern California.
`An American Rhapsody' begins in Casablanca-esque black-and-white, as Peter (Tony Goldwyn) and Margit (Nastassja Kinski) escape from Budapest with their 5-year-old daughter, leaving baby Suzanne to be smuggled out separately a day or two later by a woman who specializes in baby-smuggling. But all does not go according to plan, and the baby winds up stuck in Hungary, to be raised by a childless couple (Zsuzsa Czinkoczi and Balazs Galko) in the countryside. The family has made it safely to Vienna (which is steeped in color like the land of Oz) and procured visas for America, but they have to go on without the baby.
Her parents work tirelessly to secure her release, but it takes years. By the time Suzanne makes it to America, she's a little Hungarian girl, devoted to her Hungarian `parents'. It's not an easy adjustment to this strange family that declares itself to be her own (especially with the Fifties songs that drench the soundtrack – `Primrose Lane' and what sounds like the white-bread Georgia Gibbs cover of LaVerne Baker's classic `Tweedlee Dee'.) In a way Suzanne is just an extreme version of many children who suspect they somehow wound up in the wrong family. She grows into a rebellious teenager (Scarlett Johansson), and battles horribly with her mother, who tries to control her in much the same way the Russians did the Hungarians, with bars and chains on her room. Finally in 1965 she convinces her parents to let her return to Budapest, where she has a chance to see first hand the country that has survived as a paradise in her nostalgic childhood dreams.
`An American Rhapsody' is a heartfelt and affecting story, without being in the first rank of the cinematic craft. In can err into the soapish and the heavy-handed. There is some confusion in the telling, especially when it deals with the reasons for the family's flight from Hungary. Peter is a publisher, and we assume it's free-speech trouble with the authorities that makes it essential for him to get out, particularly when Suzanne tells us in voice over `Father said everybody he knew was either in jail, or going to jail, or worse…' But near the end of the movie we discover that there's an entirely different, and more melodramatic, reason for the escape. The end of the movie itself is a problem – after lingering more than necessary over some of the earlier periods, it rushes to a conclusion that telescopes too much into too little time, giving it a simplistic comic book feel.
But the movie's emotional resonance outweighs its shortcomings, and a large slice of the credit goes to Ms. Johansson (`Ghost World'), who digs into the essence of her character and delivers something utterly believable and thoroughly moving. Tony Goldwyn, getting a chance to shed his bad guy shackles, is excellent as the understanding father, and the Hungarian contingent, particularly little Kelly Endresz Banlaki, is marvelous.
`An American Rhapsody' is a timely reminder of the preciousness and privilege of many of the things we take for granted in this country, and of the fundamental value of having a place where we belong.
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