Avalon - review

The third of director Barry Levinson's autobiographical "Baltimore Trilogy" (the first two entries were Diner and Tin Men), Avalon covers nearly forty years in the lives of an immigrant Jewish family. Sam Krichinsky (Armin Mueller-Stahl) emigrates to Baltimore in 1914, where Sam's brothers Gabriel (Lou Jacobi), Hymie (Leo L. Fuchs), and Nathan (Israel Rubinek) are awaiting his arrival. By and by, Sam meets his future wife, Eva (Joan Plowright). With the introduction of the Krichinsky's grown son Jules (Aidan Quinn), the film ventures into culture-clash country. Unwilling to become a manual laborer like his dad, Jules opts for the life of a door-to-door salesman. Eventually, he teams with his cousin Izzy (Kevin Pollak) to open the first TV store in Baltimore. Thereafter, the disintegration of the Krichinsky family is paralleled by the rise of TV's omnipresence in the American home. Avalon's elegiac and melancholy effect is underlined by Randy Newman's soulful musical score. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Barry Levinson's sentimental family saga is an engaging and affecting film, particularly in its sense of comic detail, but is less persuasive in its overall design. The film covers half a century in the life of the Krichinsky's, a family of Russian immigrants, from their arrival in Baltimore in 1914. Levinson, who began his life in show business and a stand-up comic before becoming a comedy writer, and eventually a director, reminds one of the kind of genial uncle who dissolves tense moments at family gatherings with a joke. This often applies to his approach to the film, in which members of the extended Krichinsky family are more likely to become entangled in some comic byplay involving the movie Stagecoach (1939), than to have a real fight. And even their squabbles are more a ritualized form of communication than evidence of real hostility. Given the personal nature of the material, one understands the director's desire to put a golden halo over these characters, but one guesses that the reality of the lives of these struggling immigrants was more tension-filled than he's willing to acknowledge. Levinson's ambivalence about the arrival of television, and a sense of the double-edged nature of assimilation are touched on by the director rather than explored.Armin Mueller-Stahl is superb as the focal character of the immigrant generation, one who reflects the melancholy of the diaspora of the family from the city to the suburbs after WWII. Aidan Quinn as his ambitious son Jules, and Elizabeth Perkins as Jules' wife Anne are also excellent as a couple trying to live their lives while coping with the demands of an older generation. ~ Michael Costello, All Movie Guide