Avalon

1990

Action / Drama

11
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Rotten 78% · 28 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Upright 78% · 5K ratings
IMDb Rating 7.2/10 10 7438 7.4K

bar mitvah immigrant baltimore, usa rabbi synagogue bar mitzvah

Plot summary

A Polish-Jewish family comes to the U.S. at the beginning of the twentieth century. There, the family and their children try to make themselves a better future in the so-called promised land.

Director

Barry Levinson Photo
Barry Levinson

Top cast

Elijah Wood Photo
Elijah Wood as Michael Kaye
Neil Kirk Photo
Neil Kirk as Herbie
George Fenneman Photo
George Fenneman as Self
Armin Mueller-Stahl Photo
Armin Mueller-Stahl as Sam Krichinsky
720p.WEB 1080p.WEB
1.15 GB
1280*714
English 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
23.976 fps
2 hr 7 min
Seeds 2
2.13 GB
1920*1072
English 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
23.976 fps
2 hr 7 min
Seeds 9

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by Mike_Yike 8 / 10

If This Is Your Style Movie, Then It Is a Great Movie

I'm 73 years old these days. I first saw Avalon about 25 years ago and I thought it was a fine movie. I watched it again yesterday and, in my eyes, it has now become a masterpiece. It is essentially about the life of one immigrant who came to America in 1914 as a young man, brought over by his brothers who came before him. He starts a family. The movie follows the family through the decades ranging from the 1940s to the 1970s. The family is in most ways ordinary. No one invents anything. These is no great artist, nor criminal. It is, essentially, a sentimental, somewhat bittersweet trip through mid-20th Century America.I guess I have come to love Avalon because I have taken that same trip. My life's journey was about 20 years later than the one portrayed in the movie, and I was in Columbus, Ohio, not Baltimore, but many of the vignettes depicted in Avalon could have been mine. So, my 8-star rating is based largely on how I personally identify with the movie. If I were 18 and were watching it on TV on a Saturday afternoon, I'm not sure I would have made it through the whole movie. The film would not speak to me, at least not yet. Fact is, I may be in the last generation that sees Avalon in nostalgic terms rather than historic terms. I guess that's what happens with the passing of time.
Reviewed by frankwiener 6 / 10

For Me, An Odd Indifference

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?
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