Liberty Heights
USA 1999
Reviewed by Andrew O'Hehir
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
1954. Life in the Jewish neighbourhood of north-west Baltimore known as Liberty Heights is changing. Sixteen-year-old Ben Kurtzman, his older brother Van and their friends are meeting gentiles, white and black. Their father Nate, who has seen his burlesque business dry up, runs an illegal numbers racket. Ben is interested in Sylvia, a black girl at school, while Van falls in love with a blonde he meets at a party. Sylvia's father forbids her to see Ben. Van befriends a rich WASP named Trey, not realising his girlfriend is Dubbie, the blonde from the party.
A drug dealer named Little Melvin wins Nate's lottery, but Nate can't pay him. Little Melvin kidnaps Ben, Sylvia, and two other teenagers from outside a James Brown concert. Nate then surrenders the business to him, but soon gets it back. After Trey is injured in a crash, Van and Dubbie sleep together. Ben bids Sylvia farewell and heads off to college; Nate is arrested and imprisoned.
Review
Outside of New York and Los Angeles perhaps no US city has been as passionately chronicled on screen as Baltimore, which has Barry Levinson and John Waters as its competing Virgils. In its very red-brick ordinariness and its marginal metropolitan status as a place where black and white, North and South come together, Baltimore appeals to its advocates as a miniature America in a way more illustrious cities do not.
Liberty Heights is the fourth and most ambitious film in Levinson's Proustian saga of Jewish life in post-war Baltimore (after Diner, Tin Men and Avalon). Here, he brings the resources commanded by a major Hollywood director to bear on the project, employing a big cast, lavish costumes and locations and a narrative structure that interweaves the stories of all three male members of the Kurtzman family as they confront what the family matriarch calls "the other kind". Levinson is clearly after something like the epic social vision found in Scorsese's and Coppola's larger films, and his climax, in which scenes of younger brother Ben and his black girlfriend Sylvia at a James Brown concert are delicately intercut with older brother Van and his sweetheart Dubbie at a WASP bonfire party, is impressive and moving.
Yet Liberty Heights is also a creaky, didactic mechanism that labours long and mightily before gathering some semblance of dramatic momentum. Levinson's characters almost all speak the same awkwardly self-conscious dialogue: the boys' father Nate tells one of his cronies, "The last time I looked, running a numbers racket was illegal." Later, his friend informs us what year it is, by way of explaining why Ben might think it acceptable to dress as Hitler for Halloween: "The war ended when he was seven years old. It's now nine years later." Levinson's men still conduct earnest running arguments about girls and popular culture, but now that Quentin Tarantino et al have perfected the form, it isn't as fresh as it once was. If Liberty Heights is a larger spectacle than Levinson's previous Baltimore films, the genial spontaneity that made Diner and Tin Men among the surprises of the 80s has mostly been lost. When several characters gather at Levinson's trademark Fells Point Diner to shoot the breeze, you can feel the director trying to rekindle a flame that has pretty well gone out.
Levinson has spoken of his desire to counter stereotypes with this film, to emphasise that in 50s Baltimore Jews could be racketeers as well as lawyers and blacks could be doctors as well as hoodlums. This is no doubt a noble point, but it's essentially essay material rather than drama. Sylvia, for example, is an implausibly perfect angel; her first conversation with Ben is about the meaning of the 23rd Psalm. Despite the efforts of Rebekah Johnson, the role is, in its own way, just as thin a racial stereotype as Orlando Jones' incompetent, jive-talking Little Melvin.
The weakness of the Ben-Sylvia relationship also suggests that Levinson isn't sure who his protagonist is. Ben is obviously the authorial stand-in but his story isn't as compelling as Van's or Nate's. Adrien Brody is suave and Mediterranean-handsome as Van, and Carolyn Murphy nearly makes the shiksa-goddess role of Dubbie believable. But you can't help thinking that Nate, who sets his family on the path to assimilation yet destroys himself in the process, should have been the centre of the film. Played by Joe Mantegna without an ounce of self-pity, Nate is a man of doomed pride and flawed principle, who celebrates Rosh Hashanah every year by going to the synagogue, then to the Cadillac dealer to see the coming year's new models. He is the great creation of Liberty Heights, the living embodiment of the world Levinson has worked so long and lovingly to recapture.
Credits
- Director
- Barry Levinson
- Producers
- Barry Levinson
- Paula Weinstein
- Screenplay
- Barry Levinson
- Director of Photography
- Chris Doyle
- Editor
- Stu Linder
- Production Designer
- Vincent Peranio
- Music/Music Conductor/
Orchestrations - Andrea Morricone
- ©Warner Bros.
- Production Companies
- Warner Bros. presents
- a Baltimore/Spring Creek Pictures production
- Executive Producer
- Patrick McCormick
- Associate Producers
- Michael Haley
- Amy Solan
- Production Co-ordinator
- Kate Kelly
- Unit Production Manager
- Lenny Vullo
- Location Manager
- Jeff Flach
- Location Co-ordinators
- Kathi Ash
- Leonard Clark
- Post-production Supervisor
- Blair Daily
- Assistant Directors
- Michael Haley
- Robert Albertell
- Eric Henriquez
- Script Supervisor
- Julie Pitkanen
- Casting
- Ellen Chenoweth
- Additional:
- Kathleen Chopin
- Tracy Kaplan
- Pat Moran
- Debra Zane
- Camera Operator/
Steadicam - Colin Anderson
- Visual Effects
- Rhythm & Hues
- Special Effects Co-ordinators
- Douglas Retzler
- Michael Bird
- Special Effects
- Tom Fiffe
- David Gerlach
- Associate Editor
- Blair Daily
- Art Director
- Alan E. Muraoka
- Set Decorator
- William A. Cimino
- Costume Designer
- Gloria Gresham
- Costume Supervisors
- Mitchell Kenney
- Nancy McArdle
- Key Make-up Artist
- Betty Beebe
- Make-up Artists
- Cheryl Kinion
- Gina Wilgis Bateman
- Key Hairstylist
- John Quaglia
- Hairstylists
- Sherri Bramlett
- Eileen Barrett
- Titles/Opticals
- Howard Anderson Company
- Music Supervisors
- Joel Sill
- Allan Mason
- Music Editor
- Suzana Peric
- Music Scoring Engineer
- Fabio Venturi
- Music Score Consultant
- Enrico De Melis
- Soundtrack
- "Steam Heat" - Patti Page; "Bayom Hahu" - Barry Black; "At The Galety", "Burlesque Drum Riffs", "Galety Drummer", "Mama's Rag", "Backstage at Galety"; "Sh-Boom (Life Could Be a Dream)" - Crew Cuts; "Halloween Strip", "It's Over" - Tom Waits; "Stranger in Paradise" - Tony Bennett; "I'm a Fool to Care" - Les Paul, Mary Ford; "Shake Rattle and Roll" (1) - Bill Haley and his Comets, (2) - Big Joe Turner; "Rock Island Line" - Lonnie Donegan Skiffle Group; "Teach Me Tonight" - Jo Stafford; "Gee" - The Crows; "I Got a Woman" - Ray Charles; "A Sunday Kind of Love" - Bobby Hall & The Kings; "Annie Had a Baby" - The Midnighters; "Young at Heart" - Frank Sinatra; "Oyfn Pripetshik" - Mandy Patinkin; "Baby Eyes" - Brenda Russell; "La Basura" - Orquesta America; "Rock the Joint", "Dim Dim the Lights (I Want Some Atmosphere)" - Bill Haley and his Comets; "Ko Ko Mo (I Love You So)" - Perry Como; "Red Hot" - Billy 'The Kid' Emerson; "Chonnie-on-Chon", "I Feel That Old Feeling Coming On", "Please, Please, Please" - James Brown; "Blue Moon" - Elvis Presley; "Ritmando El Cha Cha Cha" - Orquesta Riverside; "If" - Louis Armstrong; "Pomp and Circumstance" - Mary Dumm; "When Love Walked In" - Brenda Russell; "Darling, je vous aime beaucoup" - Nat King Cole; "Belz (Mein Shtelele Beiz)" - Mandy Patinkin; "Honey Don't" - Carl Perkins
- Choreographers
- Jerry Mitchell
- Cha-Cha:
- Luis Perez
- Sound Mixer
- Steve Cantamessa
- Re-recording Mixers
- Tom Johnson
- Lora Hirschberg
- Supervising Sound Editor
- Tim Holland
- Dialogue Editors
- Claire Sanfilippo
- Marshall Winn
- Sound Effects Editor
- J.R. Grubbs
- ADR Editor
- Sue Fox
- Foley
- Artists:
- Dennie Thorpe
- Jana Vance
- Mixer:
- Tony Eckert
- Editor:
- Mary Helen Leasman
- Stunt Co-ordinator
- Conrad Palmisano
- Film Extract
- Marty (1955)
- Cast
- Adrien Brody
- Van Kurtzman
- Bebe Neuwirth
- Ada Kurtzman
- Joe Mantegna
- Nate Kurtzman
- Ben Foster
- Ben Kurtzman
- Rebekah Johnson
- Sylvia
- Justin Chambers
- Trey
- Carolyn Murphy
- Dubbie
- Orlando Jones
- Little Melvin
- David Krumholtz
- Yussel
- Richard Kline
- Charlie
- Vincent Guastaferro
- Pete
- James Pickens Jr
- Sylvia's father
- Frania Rubinek
- Rose
- Anthony Anderson
- Scribbles
- Kiersten Warren
- Annie
- Evan Neuman
- Sheldon
- Kevin Sussman
- Alan
- Gerry Rosenthal
- Murray
- Charley Scalies
- Louie
- Shane West
- Ted
- Cloie Wyatt Taylor
- Gail
- Susan Duvall
- teacher 2
- Carlton Smith
- James Brown
- Elizabeth Ann Bennett
- Mary
- Ellyn O'Connell
- Anne Whittier
- Doug Roberts
- assistant D.A.
- Al Brown
- bailiff
- Kenny Raskin
- burlesque comic
- Peter Wilkes
- butler
- Kimberlee Suerth
- buxom nurse
- Mary Lynn Ray
- woman in court 1
- Marty Lodge
- defense attorney
- Gideon Jacobs
- Ben, aged 8
- Jan Austell
- judge
- Timothy J. Scanlin Jr
- Nick
- Ralph Tabakin
- Phil
- Shelley Stokes
- box office attendant
- Patsy Grady Abrams
- woman in court 2
- Jay Hillmer
- Matt
- Stan Brandorff
- Morris
- Katie Finneran
- Mrs Johnson
- Kate Kiley
- nurse
- Jake Hoffman
- Turk
- Joseph Patrick Abel
- Lenny
- Sekiya Billman
- Halloween stripper
- Brenda Russell
- singer
- Barry Black
- cantor
- Rabbi Dennis N. Math
- rabbi
- Judith Knight Young
- teacher 1, 1944
- Stephen Williams
- Wilbert Mosley
- Ty Robbins
- Sylvia's mother
- Emily Chamberlain
- Ben's teacher
- Christian T. Dockins
- Kenny Pitt
- Zahmu Sankofa
- The Three Flames
- Paul Majors
- party fight guy
- Certificate
- 15
- Distributor
- Warner Bros Distributors (UK)
- 11,475 feet
- 127 minutes 31 seconds
- Dolby Digital/DTS/SDDS
- Color by
- Technicolor