Judy Berlin

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Judy Berlin is not a perfect movie. The first feature by Eric Mendelsohn, who previously directed the award-winning short Through an Open Window and worked as an assistant costume designer on several Woody Allen films, Judy’s structure ambles, taking on far too many characters for its 90-minute length. The performances are uneven, Mendelsohn’s writing can be heavy-handed, and I swear to God if I see one more movie where the male lead is a scrawny, bespectacled, failed filmmaker, someone is going to get hurt.

That said, it’s an original, evocative debut, and it’s also better than American Beauty.

Set on Long Island — Babylon, L.I., to be exact — Judy Berlin is Mendelsohn’s decidedly bittersweet and semi-surreal tribute to the land he grew up in. Where American Beauty dully imagines the suburbs as a prosaic expanse of tract housing where the only way to transcend mundanity is to regress into adolescence, Judy takes that very mundanity and makes it strange, almost surreal. No shower of digital flower petals here, just an eclipse that dominates the movie’s second half, throwing everything quite literally into a different light. And while American Beauty’s caricatures only approach humanity as they exit the frame — as if a full-blooded person would be too much for the film to contain — Judy Berlin’s best-realized characters are, again, both familiar and strange, as if they’re people you always knew but never previously understood.

"I always wanted to make a documentary about this town," says David Gold (Aaron Harnick), the would-be director who, at 30, still lives with his none-too-pleased parents. "Nothing sarcastic," he elaborates, "and no plot." On the receiving end of this none-too-thrilling description is Judy Berlin (Edie Falco), an aspiring actress who’s about to jet off to L.A. in search of stardom. As Mendelsohn’s written her, she’s feisty, tenacious and almost absurdly naïve. (David has to define the word "documentary" for her: "You know, like Channel 13?") But Falco, who couldn’t seem less like Carmela Soprano (or like the guard she played on HBO’s Oz), not only makes this grown-up spark plug believable, she makes her sing. Dressed in a battered leather jacket, then in her garb from her day job at "Medieval Village," her beaming smile creased with braces — "adult braces," she corrects David — she’s a former tough girl who seems to have discovered innocence late.

Mendelsohn’s scattershot plot encompasses not only the obviously doomed flirtation between David and Judy — they meet at noon and she has to catch an evening flight — but the more prosperous flirtation between a school principal (David’s father) and one of his teachers; an Alzheimer’s-afflicted former teacher who wanders into the middle of a class and immediately steals the children’s attention; and a pair of chattering office workers who pore over the day’s horoscopes. But Judy Berlin’s most deeply felt performance comes from an unlikely source: the late Madeline Kahn. Mainly known for her comedic work with Mel Brooks (her Marlene Dietrich impression in Blazing Saddles is priceless), Kahn here plays Alice, David’s disenfranchised mother, the kind who in the ’70s would have been popping Valium left and right, but now just floats through the world, lost in a fantasy of her own life. Once the lights go down, Kahn wanders the streets with her black maid Carol (Novella Nelson), making "ooo-ooo" noises and telling anyone who asks, "We’re spaaace explorers." Though the film doesn’t stint on showing her unconscious cruelty to Carol — Alice simply assumes she has nothing better to do than play astronaut — it only seems part of her general disconnection from the world. Visiting a friend she hasn’t seen in months, Alice is reminded that the last time they spoke, Alice told her they were never speaking again. Alice can’t even remember the conversation.

In its stark, side-lit black and white, Judy Berlin is like a suburban Stranger Than Paradise, or perhaps The Twilight Zone hijacked by a declawed Buñuel. It’s better at establishing a mood than it is at producing insight, and the few plot strands that wander in either go nowhere or are resolved so clumsily you wish they weren’t. ("No plot," indeed.) But that mood — suburban anomie crossed with a deeper, more primal disaffection, and garnished with a sprig of possibility — is worth capturing.