Baltimore Aureole

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

It's the 1950s--the last time, we nostalgically think, when the American middle-class narrative was coherent, predictable: everyone in his place and a preordained place for everyone.

This was, of course, an illusion, maybe even a dangerous one. It is writer-director Barry Levinson's business in Liberty Heights to shatter that illusion, pick up the shards and rearrange them into a somewhat more realistic, though scarcely revolutionary, pattern. The result is a loose, lively, lovely film that enfolds everything in its embrace from the death of burlesque to the birth of rock 'n' roll, but is mostly concerned with the ways in which Jews, blacks and Wasps, most of them more puzzled than angry, take their first wary, halting steps out of ethnic isolation.

The setting is again the Baltimore, Md., of Levinson's youth, source of Diner, Tin Men and Avalon. This time his alter ego is a smart, sweet-souled teenager named Ben (Ben Foster) who, having lived all his life in a Jewish enclave, is astonished to discover that most of the world is not, after all, Jewish. That's particularly true of Sylvia (the uncannily cool, wise and beautiful Rebekah Johnson), who is one of the token blacks in his newly integrated school. Their relationship is handled with great delicacy; this is a friendship that yearns to be, deserves to be, richer. But--and this may be the most poignant thing about Liberty Heights--these kids are ahead of a time that is still waiting to happen, a time when people will be sympathetically supported when they try to speak gently, lovingly across the color line.

Sylvia's doctor father sternly forbids contact between them; it endangers his hard-won position. Ben's father Nate (Joe Mantegna) is distractedly against it too, though most of his attention is focused on his two troubled businesses--a failing burlesque house and a numbers racket threatened by an obstreperous black man named Little Melvin (Orlando Jones), who portends the violent, irrational '60s, just a historical nanosecond away.

Little Melvin will bring Nate--a decent guy despite his shabby work--to an uncomfortable end. Indeed, no one in this movie gets what he or she really wants or deserves. Even the romance between Ben's older brother Van (Adrien Brody) and his Wasp princess Dubbie (Carolyn Murphy) ends badly, when her ethereal perfection turns out to be only skin- (and coiffure-) deep.

But somehow that doesn't matter. Neither does the fact that Levinson packs his movie with more melodrama--including Little Melvin's kidnapping of Ben and Sylvia from an early rock concert--than you would think it could hold. What's important is the casual, even digressive, movement of the piece. It plays like a memoir, not a conventional three-act movie. There's room here for Ben to shock his family by dressing as Hitler for Halloween, for a faux-naive stripper to electrify Nate's theater, for the strange power of a new-model Cadillac to cloud the mind of a '50s male. In short, Liberty Heights seems to encompass all the humor, sadness and weirdness of ordinary life in an utterly winning, morally acute way.