(1999) When remembrance fades after 40 or 50 years, cinema recreates the memories. It's fall 1954 in Baltimore again in the Kurtzman family in the Jewish section of the city. Ben (Ben Foster), a precocious senior in a high school where integration of colored students has begun, recalls being in grammar school and telling his mother of having lunch in the home of a schoolmate where the bread, the milk, everything was white. "They must not be Jewish," said his mother, Ada (Bebe Neuwirth): "They're the other kind."

Ben's older brother Sylvan (Adrien Brody), known as Van, is the first to go to college. Ben's father Nate (Joe Mantegna) owns a burlesque house with strippers (but television is peeling away patrons from the business) and operates a numbers racket (run like a polite Mafia, he's similarly worried about losing this source of revenue from a socialistic government's interest in establishing state lotteries). A sign is posted at the entrance to a public lake: "No Jews, dogs, or coloreds allowed." Having never seen Negroes swimming or going to the beach, Ben and his friends assume the prohibition is mainly meant for them.

Questioning scripture - "Where's the jawbone of an ass?" - making sacrilegious banter around their grandmother ("If it's in the Bible, it's there for a reason"), Ben and Van are testing the waters at the edge of adulthood. During the meal at Rosh Hashanah, Nate brings up McCarthy's intimidating tactics of political witch hunts before Halloween when his younger son decides on being Adolf Hitler (refused permission to leave the house in a Nazi costume, leaving his Viking-clad friends to trick-or-treat on their own).

Van, meanwhile, with his buddies Yussel (David Krumholtz) and Alan Zuckerman, cross Fall Road to crash a party in a ritzy Gentile neighborhood. After telling him to close his eyes, a blonde Cinderella touches Van with her magic wand and lips, while downstairs, refusing to answer the question, "Are you Jewish?" Yussel's gets into a disadvantaged fisticuffs contest with a Christian. Afterward Yussel complains of the hypocrisy that it's all right for them to hang a Jew over their bed but not to openly allow one to walk in the front door.

The three young men are called into court as witnesses of an automobile accident, involving Trey Travelstead (Justin Chambers), who crashed his sports car into the garage; they win Trey's favor for their making a mockery of the proceedings. To the question asked before his taking the witness stand, "Do you swear to tell truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?" Van replies, "No."

Learning of Van's heart-on for his own girl Dubbie (Carolyn Murphy), Trey invites Van and Yussel (his hair dyed platinum) to the Washington and Lee campus to spark the Jewish guys onto a couple of inflammable blondes, a gesture of his gratefulness and apology.

Back in high school, Sheldon, having noticed Ben's interest in a colored girl, Sylvia (Rebekah Johnson), comments on the difference between the Negro male's prodigious schlong versus the Jewish pecker (perhaps circumcision stunts its growth potential). Knowing that neither of their parents would approve of their seeing each other, Ben and Sylvia meet on the sly, dancing to black music and listening to colorful comedians of color.

Sylvia gives a pair of tickets to Ben for James Brown's concert at the Royal Theater, where she and her friend Gail will meet Ben, driving his dad's Caddy, and Sheldon (the only two whites in the audience). Little Melvin (Orlando Jones) and his burly sidekick Scribbles kidnap all four teenagers after the show, holding them hostage in exchange for the money Nate owes the lowlife, drug dealer.

Director/writer/co-producer Barry Levinson effectively, with humor and the insight of innocence, recaptures the racial, ethnic, and class divisions of the mid-fifties as young, thoughtful, rebellious Americans began feeling their way through the labyrinth of prejudicial barriers of their parents' generation. Similarly today, young Americans are more accepting of cultural shifts and changes in mores than are many of their parents.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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