Themes: Mothers and Sons, Suburban Dysfunction, Coming Home
Main Cast: Barbara Barrie, Bob Dishy, Edie Falco, Carlin Glynn, Aaron Harnick
Release Year: 1999
Country: US
Run Time: 97 minutes
Plot
Judy Berlin allows the audience to take a glimpse of a day at once strange and ordinary with the residents of Babylon, Long Island. Judy (Edie Falco) is an aspiring actress who is quitting her job as a "pilgrim" in a local historical museum's display to take her chances in Los Angeles. Her mother is a gifted but bitter schoolteacher (Barbara Barrie) who has long loved principal Arthur Gold (Bob Dishy) from afar. However, Arthur has a wife, Alice (Madeline Kahn), who's more than a bit eccentric and has driven him to distraction. Arthur and Alice have a son, David (Aaron Harnick), who like Judy has showbiz aspirations (he wants to be a filmmaker), though unlike Judy he has no idea of what to do about it; when Judy and David meet, could romance be lurking around the corner? First-time director Eric Mendelsohn has equipped this offbeat comic drama an outstanding cast, which also includes Julie Kavner, Anne Meara, and {$Novella Nelson. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Review
Mannered, unassuming, and ultimately moving, writer-director Eric Mendelsohn's feature debut imbues a comic, bittersweet American character study with an almost European sense of weight and gravity. For Mendelsohn, the lives of dissatisfied Long Islanders can be downright mystical in their mundaneness -- a theory echoed not only by the dreamlike cinematography of Jeffrey Seckendorf, but also by the characters themselves. Over the course of a lengthy eclipse (subtly rendered through clever lighting tricks), the film reveals the tenuous bonds between its various families, and our hero, David Gold (Aaron Harnick), sheds his initial, off-putting solipsism and embraces his suburban roots. It's the performers who make this transformation so satisfying: Barbara Barrie is the perfect model of an uptight schoolmarm; as her daughter, Edie Falco brings genuine compassion to a role which could have devolved into grotesque parody; and in her final film role, Madeline Kahn lends the proceedings a funny, infectious sense of wonder as David's loopy mom. Much of this territory has been mined by other independent filmmakers -- Hal Hartley, most memorably -- but by finding poetry in the most innocuous of places, Mendelsohn makes the material his own. ~ Michael Hastings, All Movie Guide
Lisa Emerson - Art Director, Wendy Jo Cohen - Associate Producer, Laura Rosenthal - Casting, Ali Farrel - Casting, Sue Gandy - Costume Designer, Wendy Jo Cohen - First Assistant Director, Eric Mendelsohn - Director, Eric Mendelsohn - Editor, Michael Nicholas - Composer (Music Score), Charles Kulsziski - Production Designer, Jeffrey Seckendorf - Cinematographer, Rocco Caruso - Producer, Stephen Altobello - Sound/Sound Designer, Eric Mendelsohn - Screenwriter
