American Beauty (1999)

I watched Sam Mendes's Oscar-winning film American Beauty for the first time, and rather than feeling the wait was worth it, I wish I had waited indefinitely. Of this self-indulgent morass of phony insight and at-best pedantic attempts at castigating the suburbs, there is little to admire. 

There is not really a plot, which is not a criticism. Countless exceptional films have no plots but shine because of their outstanding characters and story. American Beauty is not one of those films. 

The film revolves around bored man-child Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) and his wife, phony real estate dealer Carolyn (Annette Bening). These two selfish, upper-middle class people have a large house in a nice neighborhood complete with white picket fences and a grumpy teenage daughter, Janie (Thora Birch). Their neighbors consist of a gay couple and a new family whose peeping-tom son and Nazi, homophobic-but-secretly-gay father fuel much of the tension. Lester becomes infatuated with Janie's friend Angela, who wants to be a model and exaggerates her sexual prowess. Angela and Lester have this strange flirtation going on for most of the movie, which comes to represent Lester's frustration with his life and his determination to quit living a fake life. 

What does his rebellion entail? Why, buying pot from the neighbor's son, having sex fantasies about his daughter's friend, and working out to look hot for the girl. He quits his job in a scene that was, I believe, intended to be dark but was actually comical. Kevin Spacey is a brilliant actor, but not even his immaculate talent could save this mess of a movie. Lester is completely unsympathetic, unlikable, and uninteresting. There is pretty much no reason to feel invested in his character. None. He comes pretty close to having sex with his daughter's friend, intentionally starts working at a fast food restaurant, complains nonstop, has no relationship with his daughter, and becomes a pothead. Granted, this kind of depravity has the potential to be interesting, but in the hands of Sam Mendes and Alan Ball, this degeneration feels phony. I found nothing realistic about Lester. There was nothing sympathetic about his decline, either. His decision to start acting like a dumbass does not at all feel like a rejection of false and greedy values; it feels like an emotional regression caused purely by that character's own idiocy, not the suburbs. 

Yet, his decline is portrayed as some sort of tragic product of the lowly, decrepit suburbs. In fact, the whole point of this movie is that the suburbs are evil and will destroy everything human about you and eventually kill you. The writer (Alan Ball) tried way, way, way too hard to make his dialogue "edgy" and his characters' problems "real," but what you really end up watching is a goofy film that is completely oblivious to its own goofiness. In trying to be so serious, Mendes and Ball instead created a film that feels like a parody of the anti-suburb film. 

The one thing to admire is the acting, and with such a stellar cast there is little question why. Despite being given little to work with, Annette Bening gives a strong performance as Carolyn; in fact, hers was the one character I wanted to know more about. She's selfish and phony - to say nothing of the fact that she's having an affair - but there seemed to be a lot of pain there. Annette Bening is a goddess among actresses, and I think the only reason why Carolyn seems to have any kind of internal life is because of Bening's acting ability. In the hands of a lesser actress, this character would have been even more unlikable because there is so little to work with. 

Chris Cooper has a prominent supporting role, but his character's motives and actions are so blatantly obvious and predictable from the moment he appears on screen that it feels too generous to call the conclusion anti-climactic. His character seemed to serve no other purpose than to allow Mendes and Ball to pat themselves on the backs for their (allegedly) powerful and provocative gender politics. However, much like Carolyn, Cooper's character - whose name we don't even learn - has no internal life and feels more like a caricature. He's just...there...to fulfill yet another check on this goofy list of imperatively included items in an already bloated film. 

The one character I had anything resembling sympathy for was the daughter, Janie, played by Thora Birch. She actually felt like a person (for the most part), and I did feel sorry for the kid. Her parents were the most shallow people alive. Her best friend was a mean girl and only used her to feel better about herself, as the neighbor-boyfriend (Wes Bently) points out. She was also the only character who seemed to have any emotional depth; her motivations were understandable, as were her reactions. 

American Beauty tries to be The Ice Storm (1997), Blue Velvet (1986), and Sunset Boulevard (1950) all at once, but this film doesn't even deserve to be in the same video store as these far, far superior films. It's a stupid movie, plain and simple, and perhaps the most trite, self-indulgent nonsense I have seen in a long time. It's going to take a while for me to get this awful taste out of my mouth. 

Grade: D

Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971)

"I've had this business of anything is better than nothing. There have got to be times when nothing is better than anything." --Alex (Glenda Jackson) 

Today I felt compelled to view and write about one of my (new) all-time favorite movies, Sunday Bloody Sunday. The plot of the film is simple yet provocative: Alex Greville (Glenda Jackson), a straight woman, and Daniel Hirsh (Peter Finch), a gay man, are each having an affair with the same man (Murray Head). Here is the trailer, which definitely serves the movie's themes well: 

The first time I watched this film was only back in July. I was ill that day and bedridden, and, as a Glenda Jackson fan, I had checked this film out from the library on a whim. There are only a handfull of times in which I was watching a film and wished it would never end; Sunday Bloody Sunday is one of those films. The characters' lives, fears, anxieties, and frustrations are so real, so palpable, that I could not tear myself away. As soon as it was over, I grabbed my laptop and ordered myself the blu ray.

Sunday Bloody Sunday is often touted as being one of the most moving films about relationships, but to me this is actually the best movie about living alone I have ever seen. In Alex and Daniel, we see two intelligent, hard-working people who have both...settled. Bob, the lover, is a shallow, self-absorbed loser in many ways. There are some who have criticized the film for having two such complex people in love with such a bozo, but I think that's the point: throughout the film, which takes place over the course of only about ten days, we see Daniel and Alex both sampling what they want from relationships--children, stability, romance--but they never quite make it there. It makes sense for them both not only to accept Bob's greedy terms--that they have to share him, essentially--but also that they fall for him. 

Both Alex and Daniel feel so real in this film; I identified with Alex so strongly--perhaps more than any other character in a movie--and Glenda Jackson plays her with a blend of toughness and vulnerability. (Also, the fact that Alex takes all of the books in her divorce and nothing else--and that her family is puzzled by this--felt like something I would do. I've never been married, let alone divorced, but I completely understood that one!)

The first half of the film takes place over one weekend in which we see Bob alternating between Alex and Daniel. Alex has agreed to babysit her sister's children, all FIVE of them, while the sister, her husband, and a professor all go away for the weekend. At the suggestion of her sister, Alex decides to bring Bob along for what she calls "a proper weekend." She rushes out the door when we first see her character on a Friday night, tossing her dirty coffee cup into the sink and tripping over her ashtray, which she just leaves on the floor. The children are loud as can be and almost out of control, but so very cute. The eldest, Lucy, who appears to be about 10, is the one with whom Alex identifies, as we come to see later. 

Watching this movie for the seventh or eighth time (I've lost count), I did catch some new things. For one, when Alex is rushing out the door, she grabs what I realized tonight were children's books and stuffs them into her bag. She seems incredibly happy when she and Bob are watching the kids together: she plays with them outside, cuddles them, and seems blissful. It is when Bob suddenly leaves, however, on Saturday evening, that we see this all fall apart. Bob leaves to go to Daniel--of whom Alex is very aware--and Alex is devastated. Later, she makes fudge for the children, but eats some of it herself, sitting alone, crying. She tries to cuddle one of her other nieces, who only wants to get back to playing. The self-imposed isolation as a result of Bob's abandoning her reinforces the fact that this dream life--house, kids, husband--is something that will forever be out of her reach. Indeed, the next day, Sunday, we see a similar fate, which Alex and Bob take the children to the park, only to have something tragic happen, which prompts Alex to have flashbacks--done most appealingly by director John Schlesinger--in which she identifies with Lucy. Also, a bit of trivia: the park scene marks the film debut of...Daniel Day-Lewis! He's about 14 years old here, playing a little punk who scratches up cars (at 1:35):

Despite her divorce, Alex still wears her wedding ring, which is a emblem of how frozen she is. She works at a job she hates and spends much of the film composing her resignation letter; she is watching children she genuinely loves but who don't belong to her; her boyfriend is involved with another man; and her parents, we see later, want her to return to her ex-husband. Yet, Alex remains a resilient character; she endures the painful journey of this film in which she learns it is possible to reject the sentimental lie about the glories of domesticity and be okay. As the quote at the beginning of this review sums up: "There are times when nothing has to be better than anything."

Daniel is in a similarly trapped position. As a Jewish doctor whose family, as we learn during his nephew's Bar Mitzvah, has no idea he is gay, he seems to exist for the sake of other people. Patients call him and pop into his house frequently, and he always puts his own life aside for them. Much like Alex identifies with Lucy, Daniel is reminded of his own Bar Mitzvah, which provokes powerful memories. When he is at the nephew's party, which is nothing short of a gala, Daniel is isolated in the crowd, so to speak. His family has seated him next to a woman in the hopes he will "finally" have a girlfriend...much like Alex's sister wants her to have a weekend alone with Bob and the children. And neither situation leads to any sort of "happily ever after."

This film is revolutionary in many ways, but especially in the honesty with which it portrays a gay couple. There is a passionate kiss between the two of them, one that was shocking in its day, and we see Daniel and Bob in bed a few times. One of the most significant revelations of this film is that Daniel is a man first and a gay man second. Truly, throughout the film his sexuality feels almost irrelevant; instead, the audience is invested in his feelings, struggles, and, ultimately, disappointments. In a way, Sunday Bloody Sunday may be more important to the portrayal of gay people in film than Brokeback Mountain. 

As I said earlier, Sunday Bloody Sunday is the best movie about living alone that I have ever seen, and I stress this because although the movie centers on the "relationship among three sensual people" (as the tagline from the 70's goes), it's really about the failure of this relationship. Daniel and Alex are isolated and alone; they never quite fit in among their families or their friends, and neither of them find any kind of "true love" by the film's end. One of my favorite scenes is when Alex returns to her apartment after being with the children all weekend. After being bombarded constantly with so much noise and chaos, she is now completely alone; her apartment is silent--uncomfortably silent. She enters and sees her dirty dishes still in the sink. She scans the room, taking in the mess and the quiet, after which she spots her turned over ashtray, picks up the cigarette butts, and rubs the ashes into the carpet with her foot while the screen fades to black. This is a powerful image to me; as an aunt who lives alone, I could fully understand the weight of emotions flooding her in that scene. It's so simple, but so relatable and real. 

Sunday Bloody Sunday is one of the truest films I've ever seen, which is something absent from today's movies. The only stories we ever see are what I call "man movies": comic book films, biopics about white men, or true stories about white men. I'm at a loss trying to think of a film from the past five years with a woman character half as complex as Alex Greville--or even a man half as complicated as Daniel. There are no stories (and certainly no original stories) in today's films about everyday life. Nothing. 

Sunday Bloody Sunday is a masterpiece. Truly, the depth of this film cannot be overstated. I have barely begun to scratch the surface of this beautiful film, despite my lengthy review. It's a beautiful, sensual, and sentient film about two people who have allowed themselves to settle. 

Grade: A+