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Warning! This articles reveals significant plot details of the films American Beauty and Road to Perdition, and the Broadway play Cabaret. Do not read if you do not wish to learn the endings of these works.
It is very reasonable, and probably accurate, to say that a filmmaker cannot be called an auteur with only two films to his credit. But all auteurs had to start somewhere, and there was a time when even Howard Hawks or Alfred Hitchcock had made only two films. Certainly it is too early to declare that Sam Mendes is an auteur, but it is not too early to begin to look for the signs of an auteur in his films. In fact, though the term auteur applies strictly to filmmaking, Mendes has a celebrated career as a stage director that may perhaps add to our investigation. In order to establish Mendes as a potential auteur, we mush establish that there are recognizable themes and visual styles running through his work. Even at this early stage in his career as a filmmaker, I believe that this can be done. American Beauty brought Mendes into the film world, though he was already well known for his London and Broadway theatre work, including Assassins, The Glass Menagerie, The Blue Room, Oliver!, The Cherry Orchard, and the Tony Award-winning revival of Cabaret, which we will return to in a bit. Released in 1999, Beauty is one of the most amazing film directorial debuts in the history of the movies, and went on to win many deserved awards for itself and for Mendes. The setting is familiar: suburban America. The characters may even be familiar: the dominated husband stuck in a drudgerous job, the overly-enthusiastic career-driven wife, the alienated daughter, the homophobic retired army colonel, the sexpot cheerleader, etc. We've seen them all before. But never have their lives been laid raw as harshly or unwaveringly as here. Many movies are distasteful. Some movies are beautiful. American Beauty manages to be both. Mendes was criticized by some for judging American suburbanites too harshly, and backed off a little with his second film, Road to Perdition. While certain parts of Perdition are shocking and disturbing, as a whole it is much more mellow than American Beauty. This is primarily a story of relationships among fathers and sons, and though the characters happen to be gangsters, they are much more personable than anyone in Beauty. Critics disagree on whether this general likableness is good for the picture or not, but it is unquestionably there. The elements of Perdition, too, are recognizable: 1920s-era gangsters, in and around the Chicago area, engage in an internal war that barely affects the population at large. Violence leads to more violence, only ending when all the combatants are killed. Mike Sullivan, though, is not the gangster of 1930s movies-he is only in the business because he owes everything to gangland boss John Rooney, and because he knows how to do nothing else. The last thing he wants is for his young son, Michael, to follow in his footsteps. So if the message of American Beauty is that seemingly normal, upstanding families are actually filled with perverse and unbalanced people who hate each other, the message of Road to Perdition is that seemingly wicked, unredeemable killers can truly care about their families and each other. The films seem to be the inverse of each other, and to have little in common. But upon closer inspection, they actually have a number of things in common, both thematically and stylistically. In fact, the cursory explanation of American Beauty at the beginning of this paragraph is not all there is to the story. For although the characters in Beauty do exhibit hatred toward each other, the filmmakers tell us that this is not the way it has to be. Lester recovers his humanity by the end, and in the moment of his death, all he can think of is how much beauty there is in the world, and how much he loved his wife and his daughter. So ultimately, though "American Beauty" refers to the roses that Carolyn grows so perfectly and are a symbol of everything that is wrong with the Burnhams, we must also realize that the film is about seeing the glimpses of beauty that remain in an ugly world. Page last updated 8/1/04. |
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