'Judy' is American ugly, but better than 'Beauty'

As Judy Berlin opens, its eponym (Edie Falco) is trying to say goodbye to a man standing across the commuter railroad tracks. She is leaving her suburban hometown of Babylon later that day to become a movie star in Los Angeles. "California!" she yells at the top of her lungs, but the man is too far away to understand her.

Quickly, in a series of short scenes, we meet Judy Berlin's other characters. The camera steals upon them when they are most isolated: a housewife trying to remember a little rhyme about being 16, her husband standing quietly in the dark, their 30-year-old son sobbing in the bathroom. In another part of town, an old woman stands stranded on her own lawn, having forgotten what purpose had brought her there. In an empty classroom, a teacher (Judy's mother, it turns out) writes the exact time of anexpected solar eclipse on the blackboard.

Film

Judy Berlin Written and directed by Eric Mendelsohn Starring Madeline Kahn and Edie Falco Playing nationwide

The film follows these characters for a single day, as the strangeness of the unusually long eclipse draws them toward each other. Judy Berlin moves slowly through these episodes, and its exploration of fairly conventional themes of suburban life would quickly become tedious were it not for the powerful acting and script.

Though this is the first feature film that Eric Mendelsohn has written, the dialogue is always believable. He captures the inconsistencies and omissions that characterize natural speech—the dialogue in that other recent, much-overrated movie about suburbia seems stylized and artificial by comparison. Also unlike American Beauty, there are no overwrought hysterics to obscure the characters' suffering.

But perhaps the greatest difference between American Beauty and Judy Berlin is in how the two films look at their similarly archetypal characters. While Beauty director Sam Mendes never really decides between satire and drama, Mendelsohn has no such doubts. He makes every effort to portray his characters with sympathy and seriousness, and to make laughter or mockery feel inappropriate.

The film's success in avoiding satire testifies to the quality of the acting, which is excellent across the board. Madeline Kahn, playing the housewife Alice Gold in her last role (she died in December 1999), is particularly good—but it is hard to single anyone out, as Bob Dishy (Arthur), Barbara Barrie (Sue Berlin), Falco, and Aaron Harnick (David) all deliver subtle, sophisticated performances.

The film succeeds visually as well. Indoors, the camera moves slowly, lingering on furniture and various bric-a-brac as the all-pervasive lethargy afflicts even the camera. Outside, on the other hand, Mendelsohn and cinematographer Jeffrey Seckendorf often choose to cut between still images. The images themselves—a gas station, a power meter, the railroad tracks—and their rhythmic succession (in the opening credit sequence, the chiming of the town bell punctuates the cuts) evoke an existence ordered by schedules and timetables.

The film does have significant flaws, however. The prolonged eclipse is a strange and unnecessary contrivance. Its only purpose seems to be to bring Alice outside, so that she can wander the streets, pretending to be a space explorer. Mendelsohn seemed to have had doubts about this device—at one point, a pretentiously stupid character suggests that the eclipse might have great meaning, only to have this notion laughed at by Alice's adult son, David.

Most significantly, it seems farfetched that Judy, in the space of a single day, manages to inspire David to live and work again. True, her pluck is paired with a beautiful set of adult braces, and she refuses to let David's cruel lecture on "reality" stop her. But David has spent the last several years being disappointed and bitter and encounters Judy while in the very depths of depression—yet he is filled with a smiling resolve by the time they part.

Nevertheless, the film's successes in actin, script, and cinematography far outweigh these flaws. Judy Berlin won't win best picture at the Oscars as American Beauty will (although it has won several prestigious prizes, including the Director's Award at Sundance), but it's a better way to spend eight dollars.

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