MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Avalon’s’ Family Pictures

Barry Levinson’s “Avalon” is a combination mood-memory play and family saga. Set in Baltimore and stretching from 1914 through the ‘60s, it’s an unusually ambitious work.

Levinson’s best previous films, “Diner” and “Tin Men,” were both semi-autobiographical odes to his hometown experience. With “Avalon,” Levinson is trying to incorporate the digressive, yarn-like quality of those films into a much broader framework. He is trying to create an intimate epic.

In the process, he has also put to use everything he has learned about filmmaking since his “Diner” debut. “Avalon” (at the AMC Century 14) is impressively scaled, with picture-perfect camera work, a soaring Randy Newman score, glittering period re-creations. It’s a superbly well-turned out film, but something is missing from the presentation--a respect, perhaps, for the audience’s ability to be moved without coercion. There are some deeply felt passages in “Avalon,” but to get to them you have to sort through bales of overblown sequences in which our responses are as built-in as they are in a Norman Rockwell painting.

There are pleasures in this approach. Sometimes it’s a relief to sit through a movie that does all the work for you. Levinson telegraphs everything, from an attack on a child by a swarm of bees to a five-alarm fire. His sentimentality, viewed in the glow of “Diner” and “Tin Men,” comes across like an accumulation of bad habits. The artist in Levinson keeps getting done in by the pious showman.

At the center of “Avalon” (rated PG) is Sam Krichinsky (Armin Mueller-Stahl), a stalwart Old World man who emigrated to Baltimore from Russia in 1914, married, settled into a working-class row-house neighborhood and, joined by his brothers, went into the wallpaper-hanging business.

The continuity of family is Sam’s lifeblood. The disruption of the family is the film’s central tragedy. As the years tick off, he keeps his squabbling brood together by presiding over “family circle” meetings; at Thanksgiving dinners he regularly recounts to a new generation of Krichinskys the saga of his own father’s arrival in America, his first meeting with his bride-to-be (Joan Plowright), and on and on. Sam ought to be a pain--an old wheeze--but Mueller-Stahl is such an impassioned actor that he turns him into a heroic figure. It’s a rare example of a folkloric performance that doesn’t seem any less human for being larger-than-life.

Levinson works up a lot of then-and-now games, as if to demonstrate that the experience of America tempered the immigrants’ starry dreams into something harsher than they could ever have anticipated. Sam and his brothers still have their roisterous energy, but it is in the eyes of Sam’s son Jules (Aidan Quinn) and his nephew Izzy (Kevin Pollak) that you can see the sharpest glints. They go into business together, selling at first only that new and insidious piece of living room furniture, the television set, and then opening up a giant department store. For them, America is still the place where you can make it big on salesmanship and chutzpah.

Levinson’s vision of the immigrant experience doesn’t have the shadowed irony that we have come to expect from more revisionist views of the American past. The Krichinsky saga, for all its built-in heartbreak, is deeply conventional; Levinson pushes a musty, antiquated tone throughout. He singles out television and suburbia for the breakdown of the American family.

Despite the highly individual cast of characters, the film has an uncomfortably generic quality; Levinson seems so intent on making the Krichinskys representative of the Immigrant Experience that he neglects to particularize that experience.

Mueller-Stahl may be the film’s centerpiece, but he’s far from the whole show. As Jules and Izzy, Aidan Quinn and Kevin Pollak share an avid camaraderie; they demonstrate an intuitive mastery of how these two young men, as business partners and as cousins, would complement each other. Jules’ wife, Ann, is played by Elizabeth Perkins at the peak of her craft. Ann is essentially a proud, private woman thrust into an extended-family jamboree; her slow burns are laced with real pain, just as her scenes with her delicate son, Michael (Elijah Wood), are shot through with an understated tenderness. Lou Jacobi, as the most tempestuous and sensitive-skinned Krichinsky brother, brings to the role his glorious high-handedness and crack comic timing.

As Sam’s wife, Plowright is astonishing (as she was earlier this year in Lawrence Kasdan’s neglected “I Love You to Death,” where she also played a half-dotty immigrant mother). Plowright’s Eva is triumphantly assimilation-free. She looks upon America as curious, crazy terrain.

If “Avalon” doesn’t succeed in its family-of-man approach, it triumphs on a more theatrical level, as a family-of-actors movie. What “Avalon” is really about is the magic of performing.