Avalon

I mentioned yesterday evening that British actress Joan Plowright died on Thursday at the age of 95, and that I had her role in the movie Avalon on my DVR. Not only that, but I'd already watched it intending to do a post on it and schedule it in my queue of movies to blog about. But with the death of Plowright, I've decided to move up my post on Avalon to now.

Sam Krichinsky (Armin Mueller-Stahl) is the youngest of five brothers living in Baltimore in the late 1940s. As the movie opens, it's Thanksgiving, and Sam is telling the generation of grandchildren, who would be roughly in the single digits in terms of ages, how he emigrated to the US when his older brothers could afford to bring him over, which resulted in his arriving in Baltimore on July 4, 1914. Of course, we know what a big day July 4 is, but a newly-arrived immigrant probably wouldn't, so for him all the fireworks and such are a shock and a metaphor for the land of opportunity that America is consistently presented as in the popular culture. The Krichinsky brothers work as wallpaper hangers, which doesn't seem like much but then the trades have always been important. It's at least enough to earn a living.

You get the impression that everyone in the family, even the grandkids, have heard the stories from Sam and the other patriarchs of how they came to America, and were also able to marry nice Jewish immigrant women; among the wives is Eva, who is the character played by the aforementioned Joan Plowright. She eventually gave birth to Jules (Aidan Quinn), and Jules would grow up to marry Ann (Elizabeth Perkins) and start a family of their own. It's not all a bed of roses, of course, as this is still the generation where it wasn't uncommon for three generations to live under one roof, something which grates on poor Ann who only married into the family.

All of the kids in this generation want something better out of life, while one thing the first generation still wants is to make certain the cousins don't grow too far apart, which is why there's still a big family council every week. It's also why, when Jules and Ann finally earn enough to move out of the Baltimore row houses into a nicer place in the suburbs, some relatives aren't happy about having to travel so far to see Jules and Ann. But while Jules and Ann do well, it's as much because the one cousin who's the biggest risk taker in trying to advance the family is Izzy (Kevin Pollak). He comes up with the big idea on going all in on the the new technology of television and opening up a discount appliance warehouse to sell TVs and other stuff to a population that has an increasing postwar affluence.

Along the way, there are all sorts of other vignettes about the immigrant experience: having difficulty with the English language; finding out about a relative who hadn't emigrated; dealing with changing times; and the like. Eventually, Avalon winds up with a sort of coda set in the late 1970s when Jules' kid has graduated college and has a kid of his own, and takes that child to see great-grandpa Sam, by now pushing 90 and in a nursing home.

It's easy to see why director Barry Levinson would want to make a movie like Avalon, which you get the impression was a deeply personal experience for him, he being the child of Russian-Jewish immigrants. In that regard, it's like Elia Kazan's America, America, although it focuses on the American half of the immigrant experience. The personal nature of the movie, however, is not always a help. For someone like me, whose father would have been in the same generation as the Jules character and whose grandfather was the immigrant, there are certainly things that resonate. (Unfortunately, my grandfather wasn't quite so pushy about telling immigrant stories, and my dad being an only child, we didn't have the large family gatherings seen here.) For people not of the generation to have personal knowledge of the immigrants in their family, however, I'm afraid Avalon will come across as a bit too distant and stylized as well as possibly clichéd. It also didn't help for me that much of it comes off as a pastiche of nostalgia for the first half of the Baby Boomer era. As a classic film blogger I obviously have no issue with films made contemporary to that (or pretty much any) era, but I've always been uncomfortable with the doe-eyed nostalgia for the Baby Boomer years.

So Avalon won't work for everybody, but it may well work for you. Give it a chance.