Word: sylvia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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They've been portrayed as the Rosenbergs of the '90s, and they're not happy about it. Sylvia and Wen Ho Lee, two Asian-born naturalized Americans, don't appreciate being branded as spies for communist China, and on Monday they filed a lawsuit in Washington, D.C., Circuit Court against the three federal agencies they say irresponsibly ruined their reputations. Wen Ho Lee, in jail pending trial on 59 charges that he compromised sensitive military documents while working at Los Alamos, was the subject of a very public investigation into whether he was the mole who gave China design secrets...
...Sylvia's doctor father sternly forbids contact between them; it endangers his hard-won position. Ben's father Nate (Joe Mantegna) is distractedly against it too, though most of his attention is focused on his two troubled businesses--a failing burlesque house and a numbers racket threatened by an obstreperous black man named Little Melvin (Orlando Jones), who portends the violent, irrational '60s, just a historical nanosecond away...
...Diner, Tin Men and Avalon. This time his alter ego is a smart, sweet-souled teenager named Ben (Ben Foster) who, having lived all his life in a Jewish enclave, is astonished to discover that most of the world is not, after all, Jewish. That's particularly true of Sylvia (the uncannily cool, wise and beautiful Rebekah Johnson), who is one of the token blacks in his newly integrated school. Their relationship is handled with great delicacy; this is a friendship that yearns to be, deserves to be, richer. But--and this may be the most poignant thing about Liberty...
...somehow that doesn't matter. Neither does the fact that Levinson packs his movie with more melodrama--including Little Melvin's kidnapping of Ben and Sylvia from an early rock concert--than you would think it could hold. What's important is the casual, even digressive, movement of the piece. It plays like a memoir, not a conventional three-act movie. There's room here for Ben to shock his family by dressing as Hitler for Halloween, for a faux-naive stripper to electrify Nate's theater, for the strange power of a new-model Cadillac to cloud the mind...
...American art song is still alive and well, judging by this lovely CD, on which a studioful of opera stars, including Renee Fleming, Sylvia McNair and Frederica von Stade, performs 26 songs by Californian Heggie, who is currently adapting Dead Man Walking for the San Francisco Opera. Heggie sets poems in English by poets old (Emily Dickinson) and new (Philip Littell) in the Samuel Barber/Ned Rorem manner--agreeably lyrical, unambiguously tonal--and his big-league cast responds with obvious relish...