BEFORE: Also riffing off of "Sophie's Choice", this is another film with Polish Jews in post-war America. I think I tried to watch this once before and failed for some reason - may have lost interest. Linking from "Cider House Rules", Tobey Maguire was in "The Ice Storm" with Elijah Wood - proving once and for all that they are not the same person.
THE PLOT: A Polish-Jewish family comes to the USA at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. There, the family and their children try to make themselves a better future in the so-called promised land.
AFTER: Most of this film's story seemed unfamiliar, so I think I made the right call.
I was partially raised by Polish and German grandparents (outside Boston, not Baltimore) who never got the memo that the Great Depression had ended, so this feels like old home week in some ways - the way that old-timers have the same circular conversations again and again, and the same arguments year after year on holidays. And the way that they're so stubborn in their thinking that you just want to shoot them - but you can't, because then you won't get a birthday card next year with a 5-dollar bill inside.
OK, maybe I'm a little too close to this one. The film follows three generations of a family that immigrated to Baltimore in the 19-teens, but the early scenes are mainly shown in flashback, and out of sequence (just like an old-timer's rambling stories). Most of the linear storyline takes place in the late 1940's and early 1950's, when people bought televisions and then waited for someone to invent programming. Kind of like how the tin can was invented decades before the can opener (it's true!).
The 2nd generation in the family has some success with selling appliances, once the cousins change their name to remove any ethnicity - so it's kind of like the story of the P.C. Richard family, if they were Jewish. And living the American Dream means barely breaking even, putting any profit back into the business so it can expand, and then being in debt up to their eyeballs. (sounds about right)
And the 3rd generation here is just happy to be kids, in the days of Howdy Doody and Hopalong Cassidy, and trading baseball cards (do people still trade them, or just collect them?) and model airplanes. Beaucoup nostalgia tonight, whether you grew up in a big city or out in suburbia/disturbia.
But unfortunately, the film is just a collection of little scenes, probably one person's (Barry Levinson's) family stories, and though they ring true, collectively they don't seem to form a cohesive narrative arc. Plus they highlight the downside of the American Dream, which seems to be - work hard, live well, get married, raise kids, retire to the suburbs, and end up in a nursing home telling incoherent stories. And that's if you're lucky, you should live so long!
Still, good to watch this in the week before July 4, the annual fireworks display is seen several times during the film. (Thanksgiving would have worked too.)
Starring Aidan Quinn (last seen in "Jonah Hex"), Kevin Pollak (last seen in "Cop Out"), Armin Mueller-Stahl (last seen in "Angels & Demons"), Joan Plowright (last seen in "Last Action Hero"), Elijah Wood (last heard in "9"), Lou Jacobi.
RATING: 4 out of 10 family meetings
No comments:
Post a Comment