![]() ![]() ![]() When Mendes cast an eye to suburbs past with Revolutionary Road, his brittle downer about a marriage in the Eisenhower era, the same problems persisted, albeit more subtly. American Beauty isn’t about the Burnhams and their friends and neighbors, but all the things they represent: The breakdown of the nuclear family, the emptiness of consumerism (“It’s just a couch!”), sexual repression or deviance, and the hidden beauty all but the weirdest creep in school take for granted. For a British director, Mendes’ persistent interest in American domestic life, here and in films like Revolutionary Road and Away We Go, is a fascinating wrinkle-or it would be if he didn’t consider it so broadly, as emblematic rather than specific. ![]() To answer this question, I rewatched all nine of his features, starting with the dreaded American Beauty, which was not only worse than I’d feared, but the worst title in his filmography by some distance. He expresses himself through impeccable technique, but it’s not easy to guess at what, exactly, he’s trying to express. That was the first time that a Mendes film had been talked about as “personal,” and the first time that he hadn’t ceded his point of view to a stronger voice: original screenplays by Ball ( American Beauty) and Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida ( Away We Go ) books by Max Allan Collins ( Road to Perdition ), Anthony Swofford ( Jarhead ), and Richard Yates ( Revolutionary Road ) and two straight James Bond movies ( Skyfall, Spectre ) that are shackled to longstanding prerequisites. He co-wrote 1917 with Krysty Wilson-Cairns, which was inspired by a story Mendes’ paternal grandfather, Alfred Mendes, told about his experiences. One reason the question is so vexing is that until his last two features, Mendes hadn’t written any of his own scripts. ![]() Which brings me to a surprisingly vexing question about Mendes: What’s the deal with this guy? It sounds like a very specific memory of that time and place, but it doesn’t actually play that way. It’s set around a beautiful movie theater on the English coast in the early ’80s, focusing on the relationship between a manager (Olivia Colman) struggling with mental illness and a younger Black employee (Micheal Ward) who’s facing a spike in racial hatred seizing the country. This year, Mendes is back with another prestige drama, Empire of Light, that seems to be going nowhere with critics and audiences, despite plugging into the current nostalgia for the theatrical experience. And I fell for that fucking plastic bag, too. My solution was never to revisit American Beauty, and chalk up my response to its surface appeals, like the vivid pop of Conrad Hall’s photography, which painted the suburbs as a sterile, lacquered utopia, or a lead character, in Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), who was upending his life as freely as Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston) had in Office Space that same year. The seeds of my eventual misgivings were planted in my review -“Mendes and screenwriter Alan Ball, both making their feature debuts, resort to a few heavy-handed tactics to get their points across”-and they flowered quickly after it was published, as certain aspects of the film started to curdle in my mind. And while objects do tend to shift during flight-no critic (or human) has a fixed opinion on anything-the review I’ve always wanted to take back, for virtually that entire period, is my rave for Sam Mendes’ American Beauty, a film that would go on to win Best Picture in 1999, a year so legendarily great that Brian Raftery wrote a book about it and the rest of us spent 2019 doing retrospective pieces and podcasts about it. According to my Rotten Tomatoes page, the current tally is over 1,600 reviews and counting, though that’s surely well short of the total number, given broken links or lost web pages or other holes in the net. I’ve been writing film reviews professionally for over 20 years. ![]()
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