Around this time last year, director Barry Levinson was still filming "Liberty Heights," the fourth installment in a cycle of films inspired by his early life in Baltimore. Throughout the fall, Levinson, his cast and crew had been filming in and around the city, transforming The Block, Pennsylvania Avenue and Park Heights into 1950s versions of themselves.
Like "Diner," "Tin Men" and "Avalon" before it, "Liberty Heights" had all the earmarks of a typical Levinson Baltimore movie. But an early reading of the script and conversations with Levinson's colleagues suggested that there was something different about this one.
For one thing, its subject matter -- race, religion and class and how they interplayed during the era of Brown vs. Board of Education -- was far more pointed than in Levinson's past films, where Jewish culture might have been suggested but was never the subject at hand.
Then too, Levinson had expanded his creative team to bring a new visual sensibility to "Liberty Heights." The cinematographer Chris Doyle, best known for his stylized photography in neon-infused Hong Kong films, and Vincent Peranio, John Waters' production designer, both brought more edge to the project than one associates with the more burnished look of, say, "Avalon."
"Liberty Heights" "will have an immediacy and an energy you don't really associate with period movies," predicted Mark Johnson, who produced Levinson's first three Baltimore films. "And it's an immediacy and energy that is thematically required." Doyle suggested that with "Liberty Heights," Levinson was "trying to give Baltimoreans a different view of themselves. ... I think this movie is a big turning point for him."
But tonight, when Baltimore filmgoers get the first look at "Liberty Heights" at the movie's hometown premiere, they will see a film much more rooted in the Levinson tradition than early talk about immediacy and "edge" suggested. (After premiering at the Senator Theatre tonight, the film opens in New York, Los Angeles and Baltimore Nov. 19.)
"Liberty Heights" is a funny, characteristically observant movie in which Levinson looks at his beloved muse -- the city of Baltimore -- from yet one more angle. It's a vividly textured slice of the city's anthropology and history that combines many of the cardinal elements of his past films. If the movie is a turning point, it's only because Levinson has widened his lens to include more than one of the city's tribes. (This will be the first of his Baltimore movies to feature anyone of color, which may say less about Levinson's myopia than Baltimore's peculiarly intransigent ethnic boundaries.)
