Μύ Barry Levinson's directorial debut from his own Oscar-nominated script remains his most perfectly realised and charming movie and is a fitting eulogy to his home town of Baltimore.
Plot-wise, there's relatively little to divulge in this classic rites of passage movie: a group of childhood buddies teetering precariously on the brink of delayed adulthood and responsibility reconvene at their local diner during the Christmas holidays of 1959. Among them are Eddie Simmons (Guttenberg), Laurence Schreiber (Stern), Timothy Fenwick (Bacon), and Robert Sheftell (Rourke). Inconveniences such as impending marriage and pressing career choices are momentarily forgotten in the face of much loftier subjects such as cars, girls, sports, and rock and roll.
Levinson's film manages to do just about everything right. Firstly, there is acute period detail in the clothes, architecture, and the blistering soundtrack, which readily evokes a time and place long since passed. The dialogue sparkles, combining wit and an air of melancholy in equal measure, and then there is the never-better cast (including a smouldering Ellen Barkin) captured on the cusp of stardom. Of the ensemble, Stern is especially good, delivering a very nice line in the kind of record obsessive "High Fidelity" could only dream about. An assured confection and a film to cherish.
"Diner" is on Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ2 at 12.20am, the early hours of Sunday 18th February 2001.
