Review: Jarhead (2005)

* * *
Director: Sam Mendes
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Jamie Foxx

That war is hell has been demonstrated by countless movies of greater and lesser quality. In most films that hell is characterized by dodging death during nearly every minute, but in Jarhead it's characterized by the inherent boredom of not dodging death and trying to fill countless days in the desert. Jarhead isn't your typical war movie and while it falls short of the profundity to which it aspires, it's a solid piece of work from the most bizarrely underrated Oscar winning director working today.

The Best Picture Countdown #72: American Beauty (1999)

Director: Sam Mendes
Starring: Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening

The cinematic landscape is no stranger to films exploring the dark, kinky underbelly of American suburbia. Sexual peccadilloes, marriages that are not what they seem, the corrupted “American dream” – these are themes so common that they’ve reached the point of cliché. And yet there is something about American Beauty that allows it to stand apart from its predecessors and imitators and which allows it to stand up after multiple viewings.

Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) is a man in turmoil. His life looks ideal from the outside: he has the nice house in the nice neighbourhood, the pretty wife and daughter, the comfortable uniformity shared with his neighbours; his life is the personification of middle-class success. He implores us, however, to “look closer.” Behind the respectable veneer is fraud and despair. He gets no respect from his wife Carolyn (Annette Bening) or their daughter Jane (Thora Birch), nor does he deserve any. His job is meaningless and his life is slowly ticking away into nothingness. He is (the film would have us believe) the average, miserable suburbanite.

Carolyn and Jane are miserable, too, though Carolyn is so adept at pretending to be happy and perfect that she’s nearly fooled herself into really believing it. While Lester has allowed himself to sink, Carolyn continues to reach, wanting to drag herself up to the next level even if it means sacrificing her humanity. She’s a real estate agent, supporting the family by selling others on the fantasy of life in the suburbs, and the toll that her job takes on her is extreme. In one scene she brutally berates herself for her failure to sell a house, her feelings of low self-worth channelled into a drive to sell, to succeed, to live up to that picture of perfection she’s pushing so hard.

Things begin to change when Lester meets Angela (Mena Suvari), a cheerleader and friend to Jane. In a scene that has since been much parodied, Lester watches as a group cheerleading routine dissolves into a private dance from Angela, who opens her uniform to shower him with rose petals. Lester is a changed man, his morose bearing suddenly replaced by an eagerness to live, to savour and enjoy the best that life has to offer. He gets into shape, he regains his self-esteem, he quits his job – he becomes the man that he has always wanted to be but was too scared to become.

Lester’s transformation has repercussions that affect all in his vicinity. In declaring his own ordinariness and that of those around him to be insufficient, he not only strips away the facade behind which he had been hiding, but he exposes all those around him as frauds. In rejecting Carolyn’s idea of perfection, he destabilizes her conception of herself. In refusing to play by the implicit suburban rules, he disrupts the lives of his neighbours, such as the Fitts family next door. Lester becomes a dangerous figure because he becomes the bearer of truth in the midst of people who feel safe only when ensconced in falseness.

All of this unfolds with the aid of a smart, darkly funny screenplay from Alan Ball. The crispness of the script, played out by a cast of actors at the top of their game, is what gives American Beauty its edge over other films like it. However, despite its many strengths, American Beauty is still problematic in its depiction of gender, skewing towards the ultra-traditional and anti-feminist in its narrative progression. The film opens with a wife who not only works but is a more successful provider than her husband and clearly puts her career before her family. Her husband is emasculated, her family is in tatters. As the husband regains control and self-esteem, the wife begins to flail. The ease with which the husband regains dominance in the relationship shows that the wife’s power was never more than illusory – she was in control because her husband could not rouse himself to stop her, but once he wants control back, she proves to be powerless against him. Further, once the balance begins to weigh more clearly in favour of the husband than the wife, the household becomes demonstrably happier. Much of the film’s dark humour comes at the expense of the wife, her desire to climb the social and professional ranks, and her inability to keep up once her husband begins to reassert himself. Though the film ostensibly stands against the complacency of traditional family values, it does in fact reinforce the most conservative gender politics.

Films like this one tend to have a short shelf-life because the things they depict are so firmly grounded in a specific time and place - a specific moment in cultural evolution - that they don’t move along with shifts in the zeitgeist. American Beauty, however, is so perfectly put together that it has somehow maintained its freshness a decade after its release. The message it imparts – be happy rather than complacent, look beneath the surface rather than at it, don’t let other people tell you what you want – remains powerful and relevant and the finesse with which that message is imparted remains just as impressive today as it was in 1999. American Beauty is a film that stands the test of time and one can imagine that 10 years from now it will still be a movie worth talking about.

Review: Away We Go (2009)

* * *
Director: Sam Mendes
Starring: John Krasinski, Maya Rudolph

I avoided Away We Go when it was in theaters because I kept hearing words like "smug," "self-absorbed," and "hipster" associated with it. I wish I'd given it a chance anyway because I liked it a lot even though I agree with some of the criticisms about it and its characters. I guess basically what I appreciated about this one is that it's about two smart people who genuinely seem to love and respect each other and it isn't until you actually see that in one film that you realize how seldom you see it in others.

Meet Burt (John Krasinski) and Verona (Maya Rudolph), a long-term couple in their early 30s still living like they did when they were in college ("We have a cardboard window," she points out to him in one scene as evidence that they aren't quite on track in terms of this whole grown up thing). When they find out that they're going to have a baby and that his parents (played all too briefly by Catherine O'Hara and Jeff Daniels) - whom they were counting on to lend a hand once the baby is born - are moving to Europe, they decide to pack up too and set out on an odyssey to find the best place to raise their child.

During the course of their journey, Burt and Verona spend time with family, friends and acquaintances who run the gamut from realistic to caricature. The caricatures are Verona's old boss Lily (Allison Janney), who thinks that she's a fun drunk and might one day be set straight by her less than amused family, and Burt's old friend Ellen (Maggie Gyllenhaal), who now goes by LN and is generally a humorless and judgmental ultra-liberal. Too much time is spent with these characters and not enough with the ones that feel most authentic, such as Verona's sister Grace (Carmen Ejogo) and Burt's brother (Paul Schneider), which is perhaps the film's most glaring problem. Burt and Verona do seem a bit smug in their dealings with Lily and LN but, admit it, if you were in a room with either of them wouldn't you feel smug too?

Away We Go is a departure for director Sam Mendes and everything seems much more relaxed here than in his other films. I'm sure that after making something as tightly-wound and serious as Revolutionary Road making something relatively light like Away We Go probably seemed like a nice break. I think that he handles the material well, moving the story at a good pace and not letting Burt and Verona get too navel-gazey, but as I said before too much time is allotted to the wrong supporting characters. Those characters may be funny, but the broad strokes used to draw them keep the film from attaining the depth it obviously desires and occassionally attains in other scenes.

As the leads, Krasinski and Rudolph are both excellent. Known for their comedic roles (Krasinksi on The Office, Rudolph on Saturday Night Live), the two handle the serious stuff very well and the final few scenes between their characters are so expertly rendered that you feel inclined to forgive the film its flaws and unanswered questions (such as, how is that two people who can't replace their cardboard window with glass have enough money to do all this travelling?). They play off each other easily and, even though this film didn't exactly set the box office on fire, I hope they get the chance to work together again in the future.

Although there are aspects to Away We Go that I think are a bit weak, the good ultimately far outweighs the bad here. As I said before, the way that the relationship between the leads is characterized by love and support is refreshing in light of how romantic relationships in most movies these days are portrayed. As a slight aside to wrap things up, I would like to state now for the record that I totally want to see a sequel in which he follow Burt's parents to Europe. Catherine O'Hara and Jeff Daniels - how could it go wrong?

Review: Road to Perdition (2002)

* * *
Director: Sam Mendes
Starring: Tom Hanks, Paul Newman

So beautiful and yet so lacking. Road to Perdition is a handsome and stately film, but one that never really seems to come alive. At times it feels reminiscent of The Godfather films, but while Coppola’s masterful saga brought the audience in, Sam Mendes’ film seems determined to keep us out. We’re meant to stand back from this film and admire it, rather than become absorbed in it and live it. I do admire parts of Road to Perdition, but ultimately never felt very invested in it.

To boil it down to its most basic elements, the film is about fathers and sons and isolation. The fathers and sons theme is obvious and often overtly addressed. The theme of isolation is more obliquely alluded to through the film’s mis en scene and one line from Mike Sullivan (Tom Hanks). “This isn’t our home anymore,” he informs his son, Michael Jr. (Tyler Hoechlin), “it’s just an empty building.” This line is specifically referring to the murder of Sullivan’s wife and younger son, but it applies to scenes throughout the film, as characters are constantly situated in the middle of a great emptiness. The indoor sets seem vast and cavernous; the outdoor sets seem impossibly spacious. The art direction provides us with an indication of the unspoken things the characters are feeling, but it also underscores the basic problem with the film, which is that it is ultimately quite hollow. There doesn’t seem to be anything at the core of this story; it’s all surface.

The film is seen largely through the eyes of Michael Jr., who spends the first 12 or so years of his life emotionally distanced from his father, but gets to know him over the course of about six weeks in the worst possible circumstances. Curious about what it is, exactly, that his father does for John Rooney (Paul Newman), Michael sneaks into the back of his father’s car to see for himself and witnesses a murder. Rooney’s son, Connor (Daniel Craig), who instigated the act, decides that Michael can’t be trusted not to talk and takes it on himself to eliminate the threat, which results in the deaths of Michael’s mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and younger brother, but not Michael himself. There is a great moment when Michael approaches his house and sees Connor standing in the window and the film switches to Connor’s perspective and we see that he’s only looking at his own reflection. Later we learn that he doesn’t even realize that he’s killed the wrong son.

Mike and Michael go on the run, robbing banks of mob money and bonding in the process. Michael feels that his father always favored his younger brother, but this isn’t so. Mike simply saw a lot of himself in Michael and it worried him. In a similar vein, Mike is like a son to John, who took him in as a boy, gave him a means to support his family, and treats that family as if it were his own. John sees a lot of himself in Mike and has a warmer relationship with him than he does with his biological son, who he sees as a bungler and a disappointment. Connor is essentially an overgrown child who pouts his way through most of the story and is determined to make everyone else pay for his own mistakes. However, when it comes down to it and Mike gets proof that Connor has been stealing from his father, blood proves to be thicker than water. It has all the elements of Greek tragedy, save and except for the happy (well, happy-ish) ending.

Hanks is obviously playing against type here, though as killers go Mike is a fairly nice one; he always looks very sorry about what it is that he has to do. It is not an entirely successful performance; the only times when he seems really at ease in the role is in scenes with Hoechlin as the relationship between father and son begins to thaw. To be fair, I think this is less a problem with Hanks than it is with the fact that characters feel very locked into the turnings of the plot. The only actor who truly gets around this is Newman, whose two final exchanges with Hanks are electrifying.

To be clear, there’s nothing about Road to Perdition that I think is particularly “bad,” exactly, it’s just that it feels very stiff and very formal. It can’t be denied that the film has moments of brilliance and is at times wholly engrossing, but there’s a lot of affectation at play in the way that it’s constructed. If the film never relaxes, how can the audience?

Review: Revolutionary Road (2008)

* * * *
Director: Sam Mendes
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet

You know what would be really, ahem, revolutionary? A movie about people who live in the suburbs and aren’t dead/dying inside. Surely there must exist some genuinely happy people out there whose manicured lawns aren’t representative of disillusionment and silent despair and whose spouse isn’t also their worst enemy and the destroyer of their dreams – or is that just a quaint, bourgeoisie notion? The first hurdle that Revolutionary Road must meet is the fact that its basic premise has already been explored to death. It’s a good film, but it is heavily burdened by outside forces that make it hard to judge in and of itself.

The Wheelers are special. Everyone says so and they themselves have bought into the hype, though the hard truth is that they are absolutely ordinary. They married and moved to the suburbs and had two children before the age of 30 and though they want more, they will never attain it. Frank’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) problem is that he lacks imagination, which is somewhat ironic given that he works in marketing for Knox Business Machines. He hates his job but doesn’t know how to escape it because he can’t think of anything else he can do. He aspires to nothing except not ending up like his father, who also worked for Knox. He has an affair with one of the secretaries that seems inspired less by passion than expectation: this is simply the sort of thing that men in his position do. He is absolutely and utterly conventional, even in the ways that he rebels against societal mores and values.

April (Kate Winslet) is in certain respects the opposite. She has ideas, she has plans for their escape, but she lacks the ability to follow through on her own. She has been anchored to suburbia by maternity and lack of opportunity. She once aspired to be an actress but lacks the talent and the time to devote herself to studying and making herself better. Because she has no income, no money of her own, she needs Frank in order to start over somewhere else – anywhere else, though she sets her mind to Paris. She has a plan: Frank will quit his job, they’ll sell their house and car and move to Paris, where they’ll live off their savings until April can get a secretarial position at an Embassy while Frank works at finding himself. It doesn’t take much for her to talk Frank around to this proposition, but his agreeing to it and actually doing it are two different things.

Regardless of Frank’s initial enthusiasm, the fact is that the Paris plan could never come to fruition because of his sensitivity regarding his manhood. Nothing sets him off like the accusation that he’s not a man, which is occasionally stated in a direct fashion (first by April at the beginning of the film, later by John Givings, the son of friends of the Wheelers who absolutely lacks a filter and says whatever, whenever) and at other times it is more couched in conversation, as when he explains the plan to other men and they question him about the logistics of it because, after all, what kind of man lets his wife support him? And even if Frank could go through with it, what then? There’s nothing about him which indicates that he’s capable of being anything other than a cog in a big corporate machine. The result, in all likelihood, is that they would be even more miserable in Paris because Frank would feel emasculated by his lack of work and embarrassed by his inability to “create,” and April would feel burdened by the responsibility of supporting him, which would leave her feeling even more weighted down than she does already.

The story and its study of middle class malaise is solid and although the performances are good (particularly that of Michael Shannon, nominated as Best Supporting Actor for playing John Givings) and the direction is sound, making the most of the intense performances of DiCaprio and Winslet, I find myself wishing that it had been made, say, 30 years ago and by different people (which I suppose it would have to be, though the idea of 4-year-old DiCaprio and 3-year-old Winslet tackling this material is somewhat amusing) if only to escape all the baggage that invariably gets brought into it. I mean, Sam Mendes directing a film about suburban disaffection? American Beauty. Kate Winslet playing a distressed housewife? Little Children. An inspection of life behind the conservative veneer of post-WWII, pre-sexual revolution America? Mad Men. You just can’t get away from these things.

That being said, Revolutionary Road is a very good movie and its only real crime is bad timing. I don’t know if it will only need a few years or if it will take decades, but I do believe that at some point, when the trees can be separated out from the forest, this will be a film that stands apart and will be valued for what it achieves. It got lost in the shuffle of 2008 and buried in the zeitgeist, but it’s ripe for being “discovered” in the years to come.