Rushes

AVALON

It is a noble thing for a man to rescue his humble forebears from obscurity, to make something grand, even epic out of their lives. Barry Levinson, whose most recent films have been notable commercial successes (Good Morning, Vietnam; Rain Man), has been widely praised by reviewers for attempting a movie that tries to make something instructive out of his family's past. Avalon, which Levinson directed and wrote, is a handsome and conscientiously made film, tracing the modest fortunes and misfortunes of the Krichinskys, an extended family of Jewish immigrants in Baltimore, over some 50 years.

Nothing wrong with that story or with a solid cast (headed by Armin Mueller- Stahl and Aidan Quinn). Why, then, does this movie set one's molars to grinding? Partly because it is impossible to imagine a Jewish family passing a half-century in America without encountering -- and railing against -- prejudice. Partly because the law of averages suggests that in a group this numerous there ought to be at least one mean, crazy, totally unassimilable figure. Somebody, in other words, who would cut through the sweet patience with which the Krichinskys confront both their ups and downs, and occasionally convert their dear, generally comic bickerings into something dramatically forceful. We're talking chicken soup here -- momentarily warming and comforting but, in any large moral or historical sense, therapeutically useless.

JACOB'S LADDER

Jacob Singer (Tim Robbins) is on a permanent bad-drug trip. This is conveyed in the hallucinatory manner of terrible 1960s movies. It turns out that the drug was administered to him, without his consent, by the government. The passages where this information is vouchsafed remind us of '70s paranoid thrillers. Since the drug was given to him in Vietnam (it was supposed to make everyone in his Army unit more aggressive), we are reminded of the '80s effort to come to terms with the war. And since at one point he is afforded a promising glimpse of the afterlife, we are reminded of Ghost (another effort by the same screenwriter, Bruce Joel Rubin), which one fervently hopes is not going to set the style for the '90s. In other words, director Adrian Lyne has encapsulated the cliches of three decades in a single dreadful and hysterical movie. This may be of interest to film students, who can learn from Jacob's Ladder everything they need to know about how not to make a movie. But ordinary audiences are advised to pass.