Judy Berlin
USA 1998
Reviewed by Philip Kemp
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
Babylon, Long Island, the day of a solar eclipse. Alice Gold, a housewife recovering from a drink problem, sees off her husband Arthur to the school where he's the principal. Her son David, recently returned from a failed career in Hollywood, sits at home sunk in deep depression. Sue Berlin, a teacher at Arthur's school, prepares her class to view the eclipse. She's interrupted by ex-teacher Dolores Engler, now suffering from Alzheimer's, who disrupts the class. When Sue tries to intervene, Dolores slaps her.
Wandering the streets, David meets an old classmate, Sue's daughter Judy. An aspiring actress, Judy is about to leave for Hollywood. They lunch together. The eclipse happens, and the darkness doesn't lift for hours. As Arthur comforts the distressed Sue they sense their unspoken attraction. Meanwhile, Alice and her cleaner Carol explore the dark streets.
David warns Judy she stands little chance in Hollywood. She takes offence and walks off. Arthur and Sue share a tentative kiss. David rushes to the station where Judy is catching her train to the airport and they bid each other an affectionate farewell. Sue arrives too late to see her daughter off. Meeting Dolores in the street, she speaks gently to her.
Review
"There wouldn't be a plot," says Judy Berlin's protagonist, failed film-maker David Gold, outlining his idea for a documentary about his home town. "It would just be about how it is when nobody's looking." David's project doesn't exist; it's a spur-of-the-moment excuse devised to cover his ignominious return home after failing in Hollywood. What he's describing, though, is clearly enough the film we're watching - except for documentary, read feature.
Writer-director Eric Mendelsohn's first full-length film, shot in the Long Island suburb of New Bethpage where he grew up, all but dispenses with plot in favour of an atmospheric study in mood and character, and like David's fictitious film, there's "nothing sarcastic" about it. Spurning cheap shots at American suburbia, Mendelsohn portrays his town's inhabitants with affection, setting out to show "the melancholy and complexity of the people who choose to live there." There's something in common here with Steve Buscemi's 1996 directorial debut Trees Lounge, likewise set in the film-maker's Long Island home town. Buscemi's film, though pitched more towards comedy, shares Mendelsohn's wistful sense of dead-end lives and his unpatronising generosity towards his characters.
Shot in elegant black and white, Judy Berlin establishes a mood of dreamlike clarity even before the onset of the prolonged eclipse. The members of this largely Jewish community (which Mendelsohn renames Babylon, city of exile) are mostly leading, in Thoreau's famous phrase, "lives of quiet desperation"; there's a sense of deferred reality about them, of holding life at one remove for fear of having to acknowledge its bitterness and disappointments. Teacher Sue Berlin and school principal Arthur Gold both display the downturned mouths and slumped shoulders of diminished expectations, and their love scene together is touching in its wary, inarticulate tenderness. His wife Alice (Madeline Kahn in her final role) meanwhile wanders the streets chanting her rubric: "I wish, I wish, I wish in vain, I wish I was 16 again." Compulsively loquacious - "There's no sub with you; it's all liminal," her son observes wearily - she's elated rather than unnerved by the prolonged darkness, finding in it a strangeness to match her own.
The motif of the eclipse risks coming across as glibly symbolic, but Mendelsohn heads this off by putting the idea into the mouth of a lunkhead ex-schoolfellow of David's who burbles that the darkness would be "like a metaphor - a comment on the suburbs". Instead, Mendelsohn and his director of photography Jeffrey Seckendorf use the night-for-day chiaroscuro to create a sense of suspended time in which the familiar swaps with the bizarre. As the camera lingers on everyday trivialities, they come to seem impossibly exotic, and David's fixation on the yellow patio chairs of his childhood ("Where does something like that go?" he laments) starts to make perfect sense.
Mendelsohn draws oblique, understated performances from his cast, letting his characters' feelings emerge in the play of emotions across their faces and the gaps between what they say. (Just before Arthur kisses Sue he gently brushes a speck from her coat, a gesture far more eloquent than his fumbling words.) Amid these lives of subdued defeat, aspirant actress Judy stands out for her defiant, doomed optimism. Superbly played by Edie Falco (the disaffected Mafia wife from television's The Sopranos), she's always just a touch too bright, too eager, like a light bulb about to blow. As she hams her way through her role at the town's low-rent historical theme park, miming cow-milking and butter-churning, it's all too clear that David is right: she doesn't stand a chance in Hollywood and will probably, like him, end up back home with all her illusions busted. But Mendelsohn treats her vitality as admirable, however insecurely based, and hints that enough of it may have rubbed off on David to lift him out of his depression. "Make a movie!" she tells him as she boards her train, her wide-eyed grin like a benediction. And just maybe he will.
Credits
- Director
- Eric Mendelsohn
- Producer
- Rocco Caruso
- Screenplay
- Eric Mendelsohn
- Director of Photography
- Jeffrey Seckendorf
- Editor
- Eric Mendelsohn
- Production Designer
- Charlie Kulsziski
- Music
- Michael Nicholas
- ©Jaeger Films, Inc.
- Production Companies
- A Caruso/Mendelsohn production
- The Sundance Institute Line Producer
- Lisa Kolasa
- Associate Producer
- Wendy Jo Cohen
- Production Supervisor
- Rebecca Feig
- Production Co-ordinator
- Alexandra Lisee
- Location Manager
- Phil Schulz
- Post-production Supervisor
- Kendall McCarthy
- Assistant Directors
- Christian Montalbano
- Bob DeMarco
- Script Supervisors
- David Welch
- Kate Conroy
- Casting
- Laura Rosenthal
- Ali Farrell
- Camera Operator
- George E. Byers
- Art Director
- Dina Varano
- Set Decorator
- Paula Davenport
- Costume Designer
- Sue Gandy
- Wardrobe Supervisor
- Lisa Emerson
- Make-up Artist
- Kim Behrens
- Hair Stylist
- Marion Geist
- Titles/Optical Effects
- Pacific Title/Mirage
- Musicians
- Solo Harpsichord:
- Elaine Comparone
- French Horn:
- Daniel Grabois
- Piano:
- Ted Sperling
- Score Mixer
- Cynthia Daniels
- Soundtrack
- "Mozart's Serenade No. 10 in B-flat" - New York Philharmonic Chamber Ensemble
- Production Sound Mixer
- Eric Susch
- Additional Sound Recordist
- Mitchell Rosenbaum
- Sound Mixer
- David Novack
- Supervising Sound Editor
- Stephen Altobello
- Effects Editor
- Jason Kaplan
- Foley
- Artist:
- Nancy Cabrera
- Editor:
- Jason Kaplan
- Cast
- Barbara Barrie
- Sue Berlin
- Bob Dishy
- Arthur Gold
- Edie Falco
- Judy Berlin
- Carlin Glynn
- Maddie
- Aaron Harnick
- David Gold
- Bette Henritze
- Dolores Engler
- Madeline Kahn
- Alice Gold
- Julie Kavner
- Marie
- Anne Meara
- Bea
- Novella Nelson
- Carol
- Peter Appel
- Mr V
- Marcia DeBonis
- Lisa
- Glenn Fitzgerald
- tour guide
- Marcus Giamatti
- Eddie Dillon
- Judy Graubart
- Ceil
- Arthur Anderson
- Doctor Stern
- Margaret Mendelson
- Cathy
- Keith Mulvihill
- Bob DeMarco
- gas station attendants
- Jeffrey Howard
- Spirio
- Sylvia Kauders
- woman on bench
- Diane Tyler
- neighbour in window
- Louise Millmann
- Denise
- Julie Kessler
- Alice's neighbour
- Ellen Baer
- nurse
- Louisa Shafia
- chatting nurse
- Dennis Roach
- Gus
- Renee Guest
- P.A. announcer
- Vic Caroli
- TV announcer
- Stephanie Goldberg
- Stephanie
- Adam Blondrage
- Pamela Bossdorf
- Juliana Cardella
- Sandra Fleming
- Jamie Giannino
- Nicole Goldberg
- Victoria Kaplan
- Brett Lustig
- Victoria Pick
- Kaitlyn Rajzewski
- Erica Tamburro
- Gregory Tamburro
- Lalenur Tastan
- Suzan Tastan
- children in class
- Certificate
- 15
- Distributor
- Blue Light
- 8,436 feet
- 93 minutes 45 seconds
- Dolby
- In Black & White