The third of Barry Levinson's Baltimore trilogy (following Diner' and Tin Men') is a gentle and low key yet hugely impressive film that is a worthy successor to his enormously prosperous and Oscar winning Rainman'. Although adopting the box office disaster strategy no stars just talent', Levinson manages to create a small yet thoroughly incisive look at the changing face of America and its values during an eventful period in its cultural history.
Set in the mid 1950's at the height of the post war economic boom and on the eve of Television's dominance of domestic life, Avalon' looks closely and lovingly at the lives, loves and disasters of three generations of a Polish family in the New World. Opening with a magnificently shot flashback of Mueller-Stahl's arrival in America on July 4th some forty years earlier, the film develops a nostalgic yet never overtly sentimental approach to its subject matter and always keeps its story-line rooted firmly in reality.
Although the film has no specific plot or central character, the magnificent Mueller-Stahr emerges as the principal paternal figure trying to keep his increasingly disparate family of brothers, children, nephews, nieces and sundry together amidst the turning tides of cultural change. Joan Plowright plays his stubborn wife who has never learned to fully adapt to the lifestyles in the West, while his son Aidan Quinn is trying desperately to cash in on the American dream that brought his father to those shores in the first place.
A tale told with great colour, character and humour and populated with a huge assortment of human characters and memorable moments, 'Avalon' is a beautifully composed piece of American cinema.
