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Wedged between his many successful Oscar-nominated and award-winning films in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, director Barry Levinson continued his personal, Baltimore-based family biography with a completely under appreciated gem called Avalon. Without the flash of Bugsy or Good Morning, Vietnam, or the high profile performances of Rain Man, 1990s Avalon was one of the most bittersweet and powerful films made in that decade.
Set in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Avalon tells the family saga of Sam Krichinsky, a Polish Jew who arrived in America in 1916 in the splash of lights and excitement of the 4th of July. This tale marked the second of Levinson’s quartet of personal stories that began with 1980s Diner and continued with Tin Men and Liberty Heights.
Avalon transcends many of the heartwarming and cute family anecdotes of the other three with a deep sense of the immigrant’s pride and loss of ethnic identity as it details the family settling into one of America’s oldest cities and eventually further into suburbia as they gained prosperity, with a blend of family unity, pride and love for their newfound land. Like Coppola’s Godfather films and Kazan’s America, America, Avalon is one of the great immigrant tales on film. Episodes of the trials and tribulations, great joys and sorrows punctuate this tale of pursuing the American dream.
Allen Daviau’s beautiful period cinematography and Randy Newman’s lilting score lovingly accent the subtle performance of Levinson’s wonderful cast lead by Armin Mueller-Stahl and Joan Plowright as the Krichinsky patriarch and matriarch, and Aidan Quinn, Elizabeth Perkins and a nine-year-old Elijah Wood as the next generation members.
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