I have a third & last post on Thanksgiving movies for the weekend:
Barry Levinson was the most successful director in America around 1990, when he made Avalon, an immigrant Thanksgiving movie trying to sum up the transformation of the American family in the 20th century. He won the Academy Award for Best Director for Rain Man in 1988, a blockbuster about modern America that received eight Oscar nominations total, winning four. He would go on to make the gangster period piece Bugsy in 1991, receiving two more Oscar nominations, out of the movie’s ten. But Avalon, which also received four nominations, is the most memorable.
Avalon is a movie about Fourth of July fireworks & Thanksgiving dinners among a large family of Polish Jewish immigrants living in Baltimore: Five brothers, their children, & their wives. It is very pleasing to see that these are hardworking, law-abiding people, that they love & care for their children with a view to their honest success (one almost wants to call them ideal Americans), assimilating & enjoying some of life’s pleasures as they earn them. It mostly takes place between Thanksgiving Day 1948 & Thanksgiving Day 1950, but it also looks back to the America of 1914, when these immigrants were arriving from Europe, & then forward to the America of the ’60s, when people start dressing like hippies.
Avalon is not a happy movie. Levinson understands these national celebrations to be rooted in the family, & the story he tells of post–WWII America is one of business success coming at the cost of family disintegration. The charming stories the old men tell about their family are eventually replaced by TV. TV is all-American & tends to homogenize viewers, whereas the stories of the old people were full of their Old World ideas, which their American children do not understand, just like they don’t speak Yiddish. Some losses are inevitable with the gains of peaceful prosperity.
Been a long time since I've seen it...but it was also about, if I recall correctly, a certain communitarian-esque possibility in the ethnic big-city neighborhoods of that 40s time, which was lost. The Lost Baltimore that kinda-was, and perhaps, could-have-been kept in part. Pairs well with the story in John Turturro's Mac.
Patrick Deneen went to town on this film: https://voegelinview.com/conserving-america-essays-present-discontents/