This is my third attempt at publishing this review, so hopefully three is the charm. My unfounded hunch is that the subject matter is so close to my own life that the editors of IMDb determined that I devoted too much space to personal experience rather than to the film itself. I will state only once that I grew up in the company of immigrant Polish Jews throughout the 1950's and 1960's in the Newark, New Jersey area, only 200 miles up the tracks from the film's locale of Baltimore, so total objectivity on my part is problematic.

In spite of my personal background, I felt curiously distant and detached from most of the film's characters and their lives. Although Armin Mueller-Stahl is a very good actor, his accent is strictly German, which, to my ear, has a very different sound than the Polish Yiddish accent that I know so well. On the other hand, Joan Plowright, who doesn't have a single ounce of Poland or Yiddish in her background, impressively masters the dialect, intonation, and body language perfectly as Mueller-Stahl's wife. My problem is that I didn't find Plowright's character very sympathetic as she is quite a kvetch, if not an incurable dingbat. Why should it be so difficult for an immigrant fleeing from economic, political, and religious persecution to understand the meaning of Thanksgiving, a day dedicated to simple, humble gratitude? Her odd perplexity is even more troubling when we had to endure her clueless whining repeated a second time. And enough with the "toikey" already! Whether that family conflict is based on reality or not, it isn't compelling enough to consume so much of the movie's time and energy. This is only one example of several of the film's vignettes, many repeated more than once, which left me shrugging my shoulders.

I specifically disliked how the holocaust of World War II is gratuitously inserted into the post war segment. I found the kitchen conversation of the two young wives nothing short of bizarre as they struggle to figure out where exactly Eva's brother actually met his wife. Why not just ask them to clarify where they met? Was this the most significant aspect of a campaign of genocide that occurred so close to these young women's lives in more ways than one?

Although the movie was filled with snazzy cinematic techniques and gimmicks, there was a strange, prevailing emptiness to it for me. As usual, Randy Newman's nostalgic score was among the film's most positive attributes. While the family clearly seeks economic opportunity in Baltimore, there should be much more meaning of a non-materialistic nature to the pursuit of life and liberty in America. I wasn't permitted to feel it until the very last scene, which was very significant, especially since the setting is Baltimore, the place where Francis Scott Key composed "The Star Spangled Banner". Why, however, did it take two hours and eight minutes to draw me emotionally into this film?

On paper, writer-director Barry Levinson's semi-autobiographical Avalon, which begins with the arrival of Polish Jew Sam Krichinsky (Armin Mueller- Stahl) in the Avalon area of Baltimore, Md., on July 4, 1914, and ends when he is in his dotage on another July 4 sometime in the sixties, is an intellectually crystalline epic about the demise of the extended family, the erosion of traditional American and European values, the growth of alienated suburban culture (organized around television) and the hegemony of materialism.

That's on paper. On screen, Avalon is unconscionably sloppy (the leaves of deciduous trees in Baltimore at Christmas are green on one block, yellow on another and non-existent on a third), structurally amorphous (the movie could end at any time or go on forever, which it seems to do), and gummily sentimental (grandparents and children are psychologically saintly). The lovely moments and fine performances in the picture can't redeem Levinson's technical carelessness - the editing is without rhythm, momentum, or even logic - nor can they compensate for Avalon's ethnographic toothlessness: imagine Mordecai Richler without the bite.

Levinson would have made Duddy Kravitz a mensch.

Avalon is more irritating than most ambitious failures because Levinson, winner of the best directing Oscar in 1988 for Rain Man, is wildly talented, and his two earlier semi-autobiographical films set in Baltimore, Diner and Tin Men, were twin peaks of Proustian purity. Structured lightly but soundly, in the esthetic version of aluminum, they vaulted over the twin valleys of bathos, sentimentality and nostalgia.

Avalon is a bridge made of lead.

But students of performance will want to see it for a quartet of reasons. The first is Armin Mueller-Stahl, the East German actor who came West in the late seventies and has not been within spitting distance of mediocrity since, whether as the tortured politician in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Lola, the complex farmer in Angry Harvest or Jessica Lange's mysterious father in Music Box. As written, Avalon's Sam Krichinsky is fundamentally a grandchild's adoring projection of a grandfather, but Mueller-Stahl's Prussian blue eyes bespeak more depth than the character is permitted to articulate; when the script does become bluntly pedantic, Mueller-Stahl subtly softens the blows. Sadly, even this great actor is done in at the end when he is plastered with outrageously inept old-age makeup. He looks like nothing less than a blue-eyed, Teutonic E.T. about to sing a geriatric variation of Cabaret's Nazi hymn, Tomorrow Belongs to Me: Yesterday Vas Mine.

The second extraordinary actor is Joan Plowright, the British widow of Laurence Olivier; she plays Eva Krichinsky, Sam's Polish-American wife, with a flawless accent, as if she had not done Shakespeare, Chekhov, John Osborne or Peter Greenaway, all of whom she has, of course, enlivened. But technique aside, she follows Mueller-Stahl in toughening up the soft edges and in softening the rough edges of a character verging on caricature; while certainly Jewish, her meddling mother-cum-grandmother is no stage- bound Jewish mother.

The most fully dramatized conflict in Avalon involves the grandparents and their relationship to their son Jules and his wife Ann (and eventually to the young couple's children), all of whom live together. Aidan Quinn, as the cautious and contemplative Jules, and Elizabeth Perkins, as the fun-loving but responsible Ann, complete the foursome of exceptional performances: he infuses an introvert with exterior life and she captures the spirit of femininity in the fifties with eerie exactitude, as if Life had come to life (it's an asset that she looks like the Judy Garland of that period).

Four fabulous musicians, less than fabulous music for them to play: the resonant sequences (an on-going Thanksgiving argument, for example) are regularly intercut with comic schtick, the most egregious instance being the purchase of a television set - would people interested enough in TV to buy one not know that during the day there were no programs? The purchasers sit in front of the box, watch the test pattern, get disgusted, and leave it to the kids. It's a funny bit, but it's fraudulent, and it corrodes Avalon, which is trying to do something new, with the stuff of deja-vu. There are two lines delivered by Eva that express the irritation Avalon engenders: "How many times do we have to hear this story? We all heard it before." Benjamin MIller, Filmbay Editor

It was like watching 30 Woody Allens frantically talking at the same time. At some moments a bit overwhelming but, all in all a good movie, also reminds me on Woody Allen's "Radio days". America, when the american dream was still a thing people believed in.