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| Sam Mendes, Auteur? prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | next There is one scene in each movie where Mendes uses specifically cinematic means in a shot. Both of them are death scenes. In both cases, we have known for almost the entire movie that this person is going to die. Lester Burnham tells us in his opening voice-over that he will be dead in less than a year. Mike Sullivan spends months hunting down Connor Rooney. And despite the fact that both deaths are anticipated, and so neither really surprises us, we do not see either one of them happen. In American Beauty a pan begins on a bunch of American Beauty roses and moves onto a perfectly white tile wall. A shot goes off and the white wall is splattered with blood matching the roses at the beginning of the shot. Only when Jane and Ricky come downstairs to we see Lester's body. Sullivan, having killed everyone who stood in the way of his finding Connor, is allowed into Connor's hotel room, where Connor is taking a bath. Sullivan calmly walks into the bathroom and shoots at something we cannot see. He turns and walks out, catching his sleeve on the doorknob of a mirrored door, which slowly closes, revealing Connor's dead body in a bathtub of bloody water. Since killing Connor would seem to be the climax of the movie, everything it has led up to so far, it might seem like a cheat not to let us in on it, yet the way it is shown feels absolutely right.. And in Beauty, we've seen many despicable things, yet we do not see this. Death is not the point — it may be a release, but it is not the raison d'etre of Mendes' films. It is a symptom of a lifestyle ("In a way, I'm already dead," says Lester), not a satisfying end…at least not for the killer. Tables are very important to the way Mendes tells his stories. Scenes around tables chart the changing relationships between characters. This is more pronounced in Perdition, but it is there in Beauty, too. There are two main table scenes in Beauty — one is near the beginning, when we are first becoming acquainted with the Burnhams, the second comes after Lester quits his job. Notice the placement of the candles on the table in each of these two scenes. In the first, Carolyn and Lester are politely, but distantly and condescendingly, trying to talk to Jane, who is stubbornly refusing to respond civilly. The two taller candles are on the outside, the shorter ones on the inside, indicating that Lester and Carolyn are looking down on Jane, treating her like a child. The bowl of roses on the table almost overwhelms Jane in our view — she seems small. But in the second scene, it is Carolyn and Lester who are behaving like children: yelling at each other, making sarcastic and mean comments, throwing food, and generally making fools of themselves. The candles are inverted from their previous position — now Jane is on top, able to look down at the childishness of her parents from her newfound maturity gained from her relationship with Ricky. The bowl is now empty, allowing Jane to be seen as the sanest person in the room, and the least affected by the demoralization of the film. While many defining moments in American Beauty (most every moment in it is defining in some way) do not take place at a table, almost all scenes that establish or change relationships in Road to Perdition do. The original dynamic of the Sullivans is established at their kitchen table — the distance of Mike from his family, how he seems to favor Peter just the slightest bit, the way Annie Sullivan rebukes the children for trying to delve into their father's business. It is also clear that something has changed the next time they sit down to eat together, after Michael has witnessed the hit. The relationship between Mike Sullivan and John and Connor Rooney is made clear at a table as well, after the business meeting wherein John embarrassingly reprimands Connor for taking the hit into his own hands, while Mike is praised for salvaging it as well as he could. Though we are not told in words how these three men feel about each other, it is clear from the visual of a seething Connor still sitting at the table as Sullivan and Rooney walk off together behind him. Rooney is disappointed in his son and wishes he were more like Sullivan. However, this is a somewhat misleading scene, as Rooney will soon choose blood ties over love ties, refusing to turn Connor over to Sullivan, despite what Connor had done to Sullivan's family. Finally, the defining moment in Mike and Michael's relationship comes at the table in the farmhouse. They learn that they are really quite a bit alike — something that scares Mike, who, unlike most fathers (unlike Rooney), wants nothing less than for his son to be like him. prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | next Page last updated 8/1/04. |
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