Judy Berlin

viewed March 6, 2000 on video

For full information about this film, click here

A refreshing film about suburbia that I actually preferred to American Beauty, which is getting on my nerves as a movie that people think says something important about the state of our society (in this regard it shares much with its forebear of a previous generation, The Graduate -- in fact, American Beauty could be its sequel).  This film is less dramatically dynamic (though the acting is stylishly histrionic as only New Yorkers can do) and far more authentic and sincere, as it chronicles the small journeys that the members of two families make through their daily routine in a Long Island suburb. 

Edie Falco of "The Sopranos" fame plays the title role opposite a character who may be fashioned after the film's maker Eric Mendelssohn, a thirty-year old writer set adrift in his hometown.  Falco doesn't always hit the right notes as the writer's ebullient muse, almost always going for blaringly ragged peppiness over emotional range.  Much more successful are the performances by Barbara Barrie as Judy's schoolteacher mother and Madeleine Kahn (in her final performance) as the writer's mother.  Barrie leads the life of quiet desperation, holding fast to her role as a teacher.  Kahn has a ball as a dotty housewife, solipsistically caught up in making her humdrum domestic life more interesting, with damaging effects on the people around her.  

Mendelssohn really has a feel for his subjects and their community, and his treatment is almost never patronizing, sympathetically showing his characters' foibles while celebrating their eccentricities.  Most of all, he understands the feelings of disappointment, fear and yearning that a generation of men and women on the brink of retirement feel as they quietly wander through their daily duties.  

I didn't find the use of black and white very helpful for the film; little texture was added visually, and color would have given more life to the surroundings while taking little away from the film's subdued feeling.  I suspect Mendelssohn used black and white to more easily render the eclipse that casts half of the movie in shadows.  The tinkling music becomes annoying midway through the movie; it's effect is mawkish compared to Mendelssohn's uncanny subtlety in setting up great scenes.  I love Madeleine Kahn pretending with her housekeeper to be a space explorer, patrolling the streets under the eclipse. I love the scene when the senile retired teacher wanders into Edie Falco's classroom, effectively taking her class over.  I love when Kahn's husband, who happens to be the school's principal, gives Falco advance warning that he is going to make a pass at her.  Mendelssohn is really a talent to follow: after this film, he's either going big time or he'll fall into a career of making Hallmark Hall of Fame specials.  For filmmakers who care so deeply about their characters, there is little middle ground.

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