LIBERTY HEIGHTS: comedy-drama.  Starring Adrien Brody, Ben Foster, Orlando Jones, Bebe Neuwirth, Joe Mantegna, Rebekah Johnson, and David Krumholtz.  Music by Andrea Morricone. Written and directed by Barry Levinson. Rated R. Now playing at Bay Area Theaters.

POSTHOC RATING:  ***

It’s hard to think of, Baltimore, Maryland as any kind of wellspring of cinematic inspiration (especially to provincial San Franciscans), but they have in fact made at least two gifts to the world of movies: the irrepressible bad boy John Waters and the more respectable Barry Levinson.

It was Levinson who put Baltimore on the mainstream map with his 1983 hit, Diner, a grittier look at growing up and moving on than most films of its kind ala American Graffiti.  Since then he’s brought us Tin Men and the sweetly elegiac Avalon.  His famous TV series Homicide: Life on the Streets is also set there.  But in between his Baltimore movies, his films have been more than spotty, with Bugsy the only one receiving anything like respectable applause, while bombs like Sphere only dredge up unintended laughter.

So Levinson must have been happy to return home to Baltimore again with Liberty Heights, another funny, touching and nostalgic look at his childhood town. It’s about the ways in which change, for better and worse, wrought its inevitable hand on the landscape of his life and memories, through the slow crumble of racial, class and religious segregation and the rise of such modern conveniences as TV and the automobile. It’s also about how both those aspects intersected and played off each other.

Liberty Heights is set in 1954, a year that carries the patina of another fading era, the Forties, along with the storm clouds of the greater changes lying ahead.  In this film everyone is facing change.  The Kurtzmans, a close-knit upper middle-class Jewish family in the Baltimore neighborhood of Liberty Heights is facing it from several directions.  The sons Van (Adrien Brody) a recent college entrant and Ben (Ben Foster) a high-school senior, are readying themselves for the wider world outside where they encounter a degree of anti-Semitism they had rarely encountered in the safe confines of their world. While Van pursues an elusive and beautiful rich girl Dubbie (Carolyn Murphy), Ben has developed a rip-roaring crush on the new black girl Sylvia (Rebekah Johnson) in his class and bravely decides to do something about it. 

Then there’s their father Nate (Joe Mantegna), who has for years shielded from his sons the fact that their middle class lifestyle is supported by the illegal numbers racket.  And Nate’s numbers are running out.  His burlesque Theater, the last one in Baltimore, faces rapidly dwindling audiences due to the inroads created by that new-fangled machine the television set.  (Nate loves the theater by the way and fusses over it like it was a grand work of art, scrupulously forbidding the strippers from even baring their belly buttons).

To get his operation back in the black, Nate and his cronies add a bonus number to their lottery with disastrous results.  A small time pusher, Little Melvin (Orlando Jones) bets heavy on the numbers and comes up a $300,000 winner.  Nate and Company can’t pay up.  They try to buy Melvin off by giving him a piece of their action, but that’s not enough for Melvin. He wants it all, even if it means kidnapping one of the Kurtzman kids.

Meanwhile, both Van and Ben inch painfully closer their dreams of love.  But Van learns the hard old lesson of getting what you wish for, as he discovers Dubbie external beauty conceals great inner chaos. He also isn’t aware that his Gentile friend Trey (Justin Chambers), is actually Dubbie’s boyfriend and is playing matchmaker to the two of them in order to make it easier from him to dump Dubbie. 

Meanwhile Ben (whose passion for Frank Sinatra leads him to forbid anyone, even his girl’s father, from turning off the radio while Sinatra sings) finds his growing relationship with Sylvia enriching his view of the world (especially music) and serving as a source of tension. Sylvia’s father (James Pickens, Jr.) a good but formidable man, flatly forbids his daughter from dating whites, but Ben and Sylvia’s feelings for each other are too strong to turn away from each other so they courageously risk disapproval from both their respective families and the society at large. 

Like many episodic movies, Liberty Heights often feels like three stories in search of a movie.  The pieces never quite interlock.  Bebe Neuwirth as Ada, Nate’s wife and the boy’s mother is lovely, but unfortunately is stuck with the role of the stay at home Mom, which doesn’t give her much to do.

While Adrien Brody is excellent as Van, his particular story of a Jewish boy loose among the Gentiles (rather like Daniel in the lion’s den) turns out to be the most cliched and least interesting of the three main threads. That the lovely Dubbie is less than meets Van’s love-blinded eye, is not surprising, nor is it especially well handled.  Nor is it believable that he would remain Trey’s after being used in such a casual fashion.

Ben’s adventures with Sylvia are more satisfying. Their scenes together when Sylvia introduces Ben to the joys of the Black American music have an easy, funny sweetness touched with a comic erotic frisson. Aside from the perils of their interracial romance, they also gets tangled up in his father’s business dealings when Sylvia sneaks him into a James Brown concert in downtown Baltimore behind the backs of their respective families. Little Melvin recognizes Nate’s peculiar green Cadillac, which Ben has borrowed, and kidnaps Ben, Sylvia and friends when they exit the concert. What happens next, while a little contrived, is still funny and suspenseful. The film has a way of twisting your expectations for the better, just when you think things are going to get worse.

Liberty Heights is full of telling, tasty and funny moments.   Ben is so naïve about what it means to be Jewish that he dresses up as Hitler for Halloween, much to his family’s horror. Nate, a true man of the world, dashes out in the middle of synagogue services to go see the new Cadillacs on the day they arrive at the showroom, before the dealer has even slapped a price tag on the car.

The most hilarious moment comes with Van and his friend Yussel’s visit to Trey’s wealthy household.  Yussel (David Krumholtz, who reminds me of Al Pacino) can’t get over the fact that all the furniture is old (“They haven’t bought anything since 1906!”) and is shocked shocked they don’t even have Formica tables in the dining room. Unlike their parents (and like most all of youth), the boys live totally in their times and thrive on change for its own sake.Cinematographer Chris Doyle uses hushed brownish and sepia tones to help convey the ambivalent nostalgia at work here as does Andrea Morricone’s understated poignant score. If Morricone’s name sounds familiar, that’s because he’s the son of composer Ennio Morricone.  While he’s been helping his father out in the studio for years (he wrote the main theme for Cinema Paradiso), this is his first full original score. His father’s footsteps are huge, but he does all right by himself.

While Levinson no doubt misses those times, he also knows there was no way things could stay the same.  He understands the ambivalence of change. It’s necessary.  It’s inevitable. Sometimes it moves too fast.  Sometimes it doesn’t move fast enough. But how sweet those days sometimes were.  As one character says at the end, “If I’d known things would no longer be, I would have remembered them better.”