Sweet Liberty
LIBERTY HEIGHTS
Barry Levinson tells an honest tale of America's coming of age.
With Ben Foster, Adrien Brody, Joe Mantegna, Bebe Neuwirth
Written and directed by Barry Levinson
THE BALTIMORE OF A JOHN WATERS MOVIE is a pretty low-down tacky place. But when it's Barry Levinson telling the tale, you get a much more engaging slice-of-life, like the trilogy of Diner, Tin Men and Avalon, or the edgy TV cop show Homicide.
In Liberty Heights, Levinson tells a story that you sense is very close to him - so much so that he narrates it himself for a few moments at the beginning and the end. Set in the 1950s, at the daylight of a changing America, it's part reminiscenc e, part social drama and part Bildungsroman - a kinder, gentler Levinson than ever before, acted with splendid restraint, without the noise and frenzy of his earlier Baltimore movies, without the stereotypes you see in so many movies about ethnic people, and with satisfying doses of sweet nostalgia and cogent reality.
In Baltimore of the 1950s, Liberty Heights is a neighborhood occupied by so many Jews that high school senior Ben Kurtzman (promising newcomer Ben Foster) just assumes everyone is Jewish, even the Asian girl in homeroom. He's a precocious, curly -haired lad with a knack for writing and a taste for iconoclasm: On Halloween, Ben dresses as Adolf Hitler, and when court-ordered busing brings diversity to his school, a pretty black girl with a doctor father ignites his passion.
The Kurtzman family also includes Ben's older brother, Van (Adrien Brody of The Thin Red Line), a college man with a taste for the Beats who gets a look at the horsy set with help from Trey (Justin Chambers), an open-minded fellow who likes to w reck his sports car, and Trey's girlfriend Dubbie (Carolyn Murphy), a flirty blond alcoholic with a gay father who lives in Paris with his lover. Ben's father, Nate (Joe Mantegna), runs a dying burlesque theater (thanks to television), where he launders m oney from his popular neighborhood numbers racket. Nate's robust wife, Ada (Bebe Neuwirth), stays home with her spirited old-world mother and has supper on the table each night for her three men.
Their lives from the fall of '54 through the summer of '55 unfold with the adventures that make up a lifetime: Some trouble at work for Nate when he gets involved with a drug dealer (Orlando Jones of Mad TV), and a taste of how the other half liv es for Van when he makes a play for Dubbie. Meanwhile, Ben gets a lesson on the rainbow of prejudice when Sylvia's father doesn't want his daughter spending time with a white boy any more than Ben's own parents want him spending time with a black girl.
Ben and Sylvia spend time together anyway, listening to black music and comedy, and going to a live concert by James Brown who, even in the '50s, was still the hardest working man in show business. For Ben, it's a cultural awakening that explains Levinson 's Homicide, the only network TV drama ever with a cast evenly divided between black and white that always kept the realities of race at the forefront.
Levinson goes to great lengths to recreate his era visually, and he uses music to set the tone, although Tom Waits and Mandy Patinkin (singing in Yiddish) slip in anachronistically. It was a time of "duck 'n' cover" H-bomb drills and morning prayers in p ublic schools. But Levinson gives you much more than trappings, like two honest love stories that cross racial and economic barriers, and an unpretentious integrity about anti-Semitism and the people who lived through it.
At the beginning of Liberty Heights, Ben and his two best friends look through the fence at the community pool and discuss the sign that reads, "No Jews, dogs or coloreds allowed," speculating wryly on why Jews come before dogs. By the end of the summer, they do a little something about this restrictive covenant - and in the process, they saunter brashly into an American evolution.