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published 11/22/99
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Kerry Douglas Dye is LeisureSuit.net's Manhattan-based Senior Editor.
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MOST RECENT YAK ABOUT THIS ARTICLE:
Subj: Liberty Lows
I don't think this film ranks with Levinson's earlier three. Tin Men was a wild Wile E. Coyote ride, and Avalon a well-rounded exploration of family. Diner was mostly good yakkin'. And this has good yakkin' too ("Cinderella doesn't have a wand!", "My parents have a formica table") but it doesn't make up for its too numerous faults.
Fault 1: Inadvertant racism. Why is it that only Jews can run the numbers racket? Once a black man is in control it falls apart and the Jews have to save the day?!? What kind of BS is that?
Then there was that scene perpetuating streotypes about black penises that went completely unadressed. Well--unaddressed except for a ridiculous after-the-fact throwaway. After discussing a black classmates huge member, the kid remarks, "He's a smart guy, let's me cheat off him in math." This just reeks of a last-minute fix-it job, so as not too come off too racist. Ridiculous.
2--Flat characters. No one, except for the WASP-ish dude who was dating 'Dubbie' was even a little bit more than a cardboard cut-out.
3--Why have the kidnapping scenes? They were phoney, and held no suspense. It was tacked on to an otherwise dialogue based, "realistic" story.
Adrien Brody, though, is a charmer to watch. He's gonna be a big big super star any day now (if he isn't already) and how great is that, considering what a whopper of a Jew nose he's got. Or is it Italian?
This movie, despite many good laughs, just meanders (much like this yak.) It has no overall point. If it is just to be a "slice of life" it must must must be more original. It must be, frankly, more interesting. Van's date with Dubbie was supposed to be a "bad date," but it was also a goddawful BORING date---*I* felt like I was the one on a bad date. . .at this friggin' movie! (PS--the shicksa who played her was a dreadful bore, don't you think?)
Check out the nostalgia films of Louis Malle for some examples of how to do this right.
-- dr no
Dec 21, 1999 at 3:00PM Read more or post your own
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Director Barry Levinson has done some Hollywood pictures, like Rain Man, The Natural, and Disclosure, but every couple of years he'll head back to Baltimore, the city of his birth, and write and direct a little warmhearted comedy/drama about family, or Judaism, or some such. Liberty Heights follows on the heals of Diner, Tin Men, and Avalon, and it has all the strengths and weaknesses you might expect having seen those earlier films.
The strengths are that it's moving, entertaining, and sometimes very funny. The weaknesses are that it's episodic, and doesn't have a strong narrative arc. Liberty Heights ends well, but I felt like it was ending a couple of times, starting about 30 minutes before it was really over.
Ultimately, though, the strengths handily override the weaknesses. If it's a little long, it's still a very satisfying piece of cinema. Joe Mantegna plays Nate Kurtzman, burlesque house owner and numbers man. He has an adoring wife (Bebe Neuwirth), a suitably ethnic mother, and two sons, Ben (Ben Foster) and Van (Adrien Brody). They live in the Jewish part of Baltimore, but the sons are just beginning to explore the outside world.
Older Van is in college, and has started dipping his toes into the world of affluent WASPs. In particular, he's fallen for a tall blonde shiksa Goddess who he first spots dressed as a fairy princess at a Halloween party. High school senior Ben, on the other hand, develops a thing for a cute African American classmate, Sylvia (Rebekah Johnson). She gets him into Negro comics, and Negro music . . . naturally their respective parents wouldn't be very happy if they found out about this relationship.
Ben narrates the film, and is more or less the chief character. He's something of a rebel--trying to go out dressed as Hitler for Halloween, and invading a no-Jews-allowed swimming pool. He also gets one of the film's funniest moments, a replay from American Pie exploiting the, er . . . easy excitability of your average post-pubescent male teenager.
It's probably instructive that Ben's foray into the world of blacks leads him to love and enlightenment, whereas Van's journey into the white world is mostly disillusionment and alcohol. I think most Jews know exactly where Levinson is coming from. Whatever narrative drive there is to the picture begins when a small-time black drug dealer named Little Melvin hits the numbers for a fortune, and Nate finds his racket, livelihood, and possibly family endangered.
Liberty Heights probably won't make much of an impression in the world. Avalon didn't. But it's a good little picture, and worth seeing.
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