Pros: Warm, affectionate memoir of a place and time some can still remember.
Cons: It lacks drama and point, except that most of us live the same way.
The Bottom Line: DINER introduced an important director and nearly a dozen leading actors to the public in a kind of Fellini-like story which started a trend in America.
Baltimore, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Glasgow, Pilsen, Smolensk . . . the far flung cities of America and the World are passing as some of us knew them. Certainly in America the old neighborhoods from which the young and imaginative once came are being replaced by huge sports stadiums, peculiar museums, and theme parks. The truly great cities of the World, of course, are being rebuilt in miniature out in Las Vegas.
Lucky then, that Barry Levinson, after writing otherworldly comedies for Mel Brooks (such as SILENT MOVIE, 1976; HIGH ANXIETY, 1977), went back to his Baltimore roots to record the life of his old gang, circa 1959. From his vantage, in 1982, he gathered together a group of young actors who could grasp some of the nuances of growing up in an American provincial city neighborhood -- before the Kennedy Assassination, The Vietnam War, Television, and the ascension of the Global Economy wiped out that essentially innocent way of life.
The film follows five, mostly aimless, young men over a short period of their lives between high school and manhood. The unmarried ones think mostly about sex. Brilliant troubled Fenwick (Kevin Bacon) exists on a trust fund provided by his estranged family, and lives for practical jokes and quiz shows. Tough, sensitive, gambling stud Boogie (Mickey Rourke) goes to law school to please his parents, and spends his days working as a hair dresser. William "Billy" Howard (Tim Daly) is attempting to please his parents by getting married. Paulie Modell (Paul Reiser), returning on a visit to Baltimore, prefers to be an observer of his old gang until he learns his girl is pregnant and doesn't want to get married.
Laurence "Shreevie" Schreiber is the only one already married, to his high school sweetheart Beth (Ellen Barkin), and they are finding it tough going as the sex wears off. Still, they appear to be the most mature -- until it comes to caring for Shreevie's collection of 45's (records, not handguns). This flare-up provides the central dramatic incident in the film.
Let's see, have I left anyone out? Or gotten a couple mixed up? They are hard to keep track of at times. It doesn't matter. It is the experience, not the plot, that counts here.
We follow the lads through a series of picaresque adventures (largely in place), beginning with a Christmas dance and ending with a Wedding. In between, the pivotal character Boogie turns his life away from disaster, and in his unconventional, often accidental way, he straightens out the lives of some of his friends, before he rides off into the sunset (or is it the dawn?) with heiress Jane Chisholm (Claudia Cron) on her English saddle.
We are treated to a number of set pieces by Writer and (first time) Director Levinson which always begin or end at The Diner, where plans are made, postmortems held, days begun and nights ended.
The power and amusement of many of these pieces (certainly for those who lived through it all) depend on a perfect sense of time and place, of detail. After his disastrous revelation about our shot-down U-2 Overfight of Russia, President Eisenhower has returned empty handed from his World Crusade for Peace, after the disastrous revelation of our shot down U-2 Overflight of Russia. A couple is going to honeymoon in Cuba. The lads play The Platters, and a score of other groups, on their radios and record players. A customer in a store where one of them works insists on an Emerson 21 inch black and white TV -- but WITHOUT a built-in phonograph.
Movies have a large place in their lives. A SUMMER PLACE (Davies, 1959), starring Troy Donahue and Sandra Dee, is playing at the local bijou when Boogie tries to win a bet about his sexual dominance over local fox Carol Heathrow (Coulette Blongan). A running gag character weaves in and out of the action, quoting verbatim dialogue from SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS (Mackenrick, 1957). An intellectual member of the group drags his pal to an Art House to see Ingmar Bergman's THE SEVENTH SEAL. (The pal goes to sleep.)
Characters eat sugar right from the dispenser. Everyone seems to have a Zippo Lighter and knows how to use it.
Wisdom is offered at certain points.
Paulie's pregnant girlfriend Barbara (Kathryn Dowling) explains why she can't marry him: "You're confusing a friendship . . . with a woman and love -- it's not the same."
Boogie tells "Bagel," a contractor who comes to his rescue with a job offer: "If you don't have good dreams, you have nightmares."
There are a few first-time director goofs, such as a sequence where Mom jocularly chases Billy Howard around the kitchen with a butcher knife. First the knife is underhand, cut, overhand, cut, underhand again. But these lapses are few and do not detract from the story.
One of the glories of the film is to see that roster of important future American actors, young and vigorous, in their first important roles: Kevin Bacon, Mickey Rourke, Tim Daly, Steve Guttenberg, Dan Stern, Paul Reiser. The women, with the exception of Ellen Barkin, have not done so well, but they are all solid.
My fear, of course, in a film this specific, is that it will date. However, it is so human and well done, like a Dickensian story, that I believe it will turn into an historical record of how Americans once lived.
At the beginning of the tape I watched, there was a blaring advertisement: "The Original Action Hero -- James Bond: OWN HIM TODAY!"
You couldn't buy the young people in this film although everyone was trying. Eventually, of course, things changed.
You will not be disappointed, I trust, if you buy the DINER.
Fries with gravy, a cherry cola. Friendship, bragging rights and does Sinatra or Mathis croon the best makeout music? Before there was the countercult...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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