Director
Barry Levinson, who won the Political Film Society's award
for Good Morning Vietnam and nomination for
last year's Wag the Dog, can forget neither
his Baltimore roots nor his Jewish parents, orthodox on one
side and heterodox on he other. In Liberty Heights,
his fourth effort to remind the rest of us that many Jewish
Americans in the United States had to overcome prejudice and
poverty, centers around the Kurtzman family in the Jewish
section of northwest Baltimore, Liberty Heights, in the mid-1950s.
(Levinson actually grew up in the Forest Park section, six
miles from downtown, and left in 1963.) Baltimore is not the
most scenic American city, and Levinson makes no effort to
glamorize his home town. The father Nate (played by Joe Mantegna)
runs a burlesque house and illegal numbers racket. He shields
the particulars of his businesses from his wife Ada (played
by Bebe Neuwirth) who is a homemaker and steadfast supporter
of her husband. His two sons, Van and Ben (played by Adrien
Brody and Ben Foster, respectively) are in high school, which
has complied with the Supreme Court's desegregation order
of 1954 by admitting Sylvia (played by Rebekah Johnson), though
a sign on the city's country club still bars entry of "Jews,
Dogs, and Coloreds" until the Kurztman boys tear it down in
1955, albeit at the end of the film. The story evolves in
the manner of a situation comedy, with a blend of riotously
humorous and profoundly serious elements. Among the humorous
scenes, the most amusing features Van dressed in a Hitler
uniform for Halloween who is banned from leaving the house
by his mother and father. The serious parts of the film focus
on the illegal activities of the father, who is eventually
imprisoned for tax evasion, and the boys' ill-fated efforts
to court Gentile members of the opposite sex. Ben discovers
that Sylvia's father (played by James Pickens, Jr.) cannot
countenance a white boy dating his black daughter, whereas
Van discovers that a upscale blonde beauty named Dubbie (played
by Carolyn Murphy) is actually an alcoholic teenager who is
unable to cope with the fact that her father is gay. Nate,
meanwhile, runs afoul of the law because he has no cash to
pay off a debt to Little Melvin (played by Orlando Jones),
an African American prostitution pimp and dope dealer who
hit the jackpot in Nate's numbers racket. However, what shines
through the overt plot is an important message about Jewish
families -- how members of the family support one another
so lovingly, including the rational and respectful discipline
that parents provide children. For thousands of years, Jews
in hostile societies have survived because of the way in which
the Kurtzman family operated. However, on walking out the
cinema, the film has raised a question that may perhaps be
haunting director Levinson: How will the Jews of the United
States, who increasingly have prospered, moved out of Jewish
neighborhoods, and outmarried since the 1950s, survive as
a distinct ethnic group in the context of total acceptance
into the American melting pot? The integration of Jews into
the mainstream of Western society has never happened before,
and Jews have developed no cultural tradition to cope with
such adulation other than to nurture nostalgia through stories
and films. Accordingly, the film's tagline is "You're only
young once, but you remember forever." MH
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