This may be difficult to believe, given its current focus on the Real Housewives extended universe, but in the ‘90s Bravo was a performing-arts network. Home from college, camped out in my parents’ basement, I’d watch a bit of jazz from Lincoln Center, or modern dance, or a British production of Antigone, congratulating myself on how cultured I was becoming, though within twenty minutes I’d usually switched to a Simpsons rerun or VH1’s Behind the Music.
Bravo also showed commercial-free movies, a rare treat in the pre-streaming era, which is how I first stumbled upon Avalon, Barry Levinson’s 1990 film that’s based in large part on his own extended family in Baltimore. A couple days before, I’d had my wisdom teeth pulled, but I’d healed enough that the codeine was becoming more recreational than medically necessary. I happened to turn on Bravo just as the TriStar logo gave way to the movie’s opening scene. “I came to America in 1914,” a heavily accented voice says, and we watch as a young man in suit and cap, carrying a small suitcase, wanders the streets of the city, wide-eyed, fireworks bursting overhead.
An experience I rarely have anymore: watching a movie with no context, and no idea of what to expect. Because this was Bravo, I assumed Avalon was a Very Serious Film, and that opening scene seemed to confirm it. The period costuming. The spare, tinkling piano music. The beautiful cinematography, with light from the fireworks reflecting off puddles in the cobblestone streets. It’s shot in color, but the film is sped up slightly, giving it the feel of an old newsreel. “I didn’t know what holiday it was,” the voiceover says. “But there were lights, and I walked underneath them.”
Eventually we cut away from that historical reenactment to the film’s present action: mid-century Baltimore, a rowhouse crowded for Thanksgiving dinner. We learn that the voice we’ve been hearing belongs to Sam (played by Armin Muehler-Stahl), who’s been telling his immigration story to the grandkids. There’s a lot of storytelling in Avalon. Also a lot of playful haggling over the details of those stories. At one point, we’re watching another historical flashback when the weather changes, mid-scene, the snow replaced by sunshine after Sam’s wife reminds him it was summer, not winter, when they brought his father over from Poland.
I’ve always been jealous of people from big, boisterous families. I was an only child, and while my mom was close with her two sisters, my dad’s Navy career meant we rarely lived within a day’s drive. We saw them, and my grandmother, at Christmas, and for a few summers we all rented a condo together at the beach in Pensacola. But it was rare for everyone to be together in one place.
In Avalon, the extended family is omnipresent. There are family meals and family outings and family circle meetings. The basic plot points of the film are pretty familiar American Dream stuff: we watch as the family comes up in the world, Sam’s son and nephew (played by Aidan Quinn and Kevin Pollack) giving up their door-to-door salesmen routes to open a department store. They move to the suburbs. They join a country club. Periodically we’re reminded of the family’s Jewishness—at one point they pool their money to bring over a relative who, along with his young daughter, has escaped a concentration camp—but the only real discrimination that registers is when Sam is chastised, by his grandson’s principal, for not grasping “the subtleties of the English language” (he doesn’t understand the difference between “may” and “can”).
Rewatching Avalon now, its nostalgic glow sometimes feels a bit cheesy. If I wanted to be snarky, I might refer to it as Baby Boomer fan service. But I don’t want to be snarky. I want to remember how easily, and how fully, I was pulled into the movie’s world. It’s a type of film that doesn’t much exist anymore, and which I miss, the movie equivalent of a thick middlebrow novel. There’s no high-concept premise, just an ordinary family living a rather ordinary life, lovingly and carefully observed, and with a big-enough budget that it’s beautiful to look at.
Seven or eight years ago, I was visiting my parents for Christmas and having some trouble getting into the holiday spirit. After we opened our presents I went for a run, which was when it hit me: the house was too quiet. Christmas is a time for noise, which is to say it’s a time for children, and grandparents, and aunts and uncles and cousins. In an alternate version of my life, I thought, this run would be the one quiet respite in my day, a bit of stolen time while my parents happily entertained their grandkids. Instead it was only the three of us—the strange triangle of only children—and when I got home we cleaned up the wrapping paper, ate a quiet breakfast, and then wandered off into different corners of the house to get on with our days.
At some point after that first viewing of Avalon, I bought the DVD. Another specific era in technological history: when DVD prices had come down enough that it made sense to buy a movie you liked, especially if you could find it in the bargain bin at Target or Best Buy. The result, at least for me, was a strange collection of movies that I watched and re-watched simply because they were there, especially in the years when I lived alone and often, at the end of the day, wanted to turn off my brain and fill my apartment with familiar voices. Dazed and Confused. Beautiful Girls. My Blue Heaven. A Jennifer Jason Leigh/Alan Cumming movie called The Anniversary Party that it’s possible I’ve seen more times than anyone else on earth. Rewatching Avalon a few days ago, for the first time in years, I realized I’d accidentally memorized whole scenes of dialogue, the way I memorized the Lutheran liturgy as a kid—another kind of familiar comfort.
When Avalon came out, the reviews were mixed. Peter Travers, writing in Rolling Stone, praised the movie’s humor, and its richly detailed recreation of mid-century Baltimore, but felt it lost its way when it strained for larger sociological significance. Others talked about the funny family dynamics, the cuteness of a young Elijah Wood, the Borscht-Belt rhythms of the dinner-table patter. Only Roger Ebert seems to have registered the sadness at the heart of the movie’s nostalgia. As the family spreads out, dividing itself into smaller, self-contained units, so much is lost: old traditions; those well-worn stories; the connection between past and present. In the final scene, the Barry Levinson stand-in, now grown, and with a child of his own, visits Sam in a retirement home. “Why does that man talk funny?” his son asks, as they walk back to their car, and so the father begins to tell him Sam’s story, echoing the movie’s opening: “He came to America in 1914…”
It’s meant to be a touching moment, I think, but what occurs to me, watching it now, is that it’s clearly the first time he’s introduced his son—who is old enough to walk and talk—to his great-grandfather.
“The story of the movie,” Ebert writes, “is the story of how the warmth and closeness of an extended family is replaced by alienation and isolation.”
Last December, in that no-man’s-land between Thanksgiving and Christmas, my partner was out of town for the weekend and I got a little high and watched The Family Stone, a movie I’d seen a few times before, and which struck me as the kind of comfort-food viewing appropriate for both the season and the exhausted state of my brain at the end of a semester of teaching. What I didn’t expect was that forty-five minutes in, I’d burst into tears. I’m sure the weed gummy had something to do with it. But it was also another big, boisterous family, the kind of noisy home I was beginning to realize—as I sailed into my mid-40s—I’d almost certainly never have. Most days I’m ok with that. We all make our choices in life, and mine have given me a loving partner, a lot of great friends, and a career I feel passionate about. But the flip side to that comfort-food escapism is that it can feel like visiting an alternate-universe version of your own life, one which, thanks to the warm glow of a well-made film, can look richer and fuller than your own.