The first in hopefully a series were I'm going to take a look at various directors and offer up brief thoughts and their film and themes. Starting with British former theatre director Sam Mendes
Kicking off back in 1999 with American Beauty Sam Mendes has now brought to the screen four films that explore American society or more accurately the abyss that exists just under the surface. Four times now Mendes has peeled of the sheen and peered into what lines beneath.
American Beauty was an examination of the sense of being lost in suburbia. The family man who longs for excitement once again in his life, the daughter striving to establish her identity, the mother consumed by her career and trying to hide the frantic stress of her life from the eyes of the world. And the neighbours; the broken woman, the wayward son looking to finally break free and the repressed father unable to understand his son's world.
Allied with the incisive script of Allan Ball Mendes' shaped a film that a struck a cord, somewhere deep down everyone is trying to recapture the excitement of youth and the joys of the dream they had when they were young. Everyone remembers what is to be a confused teenager trying to work it all out. The calm surface of the white break fences is broken when Lester kicks against the flow and the end it's only a tragedy that makes realise the what he was looking for was always there.
Mendes followed up with Road To Perdition. It was nominally about gangsters in prohibition era America but had more to say about fathers and sons; the way such relationships forge people into they are. This was a land of violence and fear. Once again it lay just beneath the surface of what initially looks like a 'traditional' American small town. It does however have a positive ending as did American Beauty but this wasn't going to last.
For Jarhead sees the main character left a broken and empty man, forever scarred by his experiences. Looking at what it is to go to war and fight for your country the film follows a young Marine through boot camp and the first Gulf war. Despite not once seeing action Swofford is left shell shocked after being conditioned to kill and being prevented from ever having the chance. Modern warfare has left the individual man behind to try and comprehend the devastation it brings without the release granted by the violence itself.
Swofford is returned unloved to his homeland, no longer of use in the call to arms but unable to ever break free from his days in the service. He is molded by his country and then simply thrown aside, left to try and remake himself.
Things get darker still in Revolutionary Road as a young couple (Frank & Rose) feel trapped by their 'normal' suburban lives. Still young enough to dream of starting again they dream of moving overseas and taking time to find their vocation in life rather than toiling away at unstimulating jobs to maintain that veneer of success.
At first their friends and colleagues laugh at the notion of escape before slowly revealing the same malaise eats away at them before events conspire against them and the dream slips away. Here Mendes has captured that bridge in life where the dreams of youth finally have to be put aside however Rose finds herself adrift having let go and finds hard to reconcile both her future and her marriage with the crushing disappointment. Once again the American suburban dream tours sour and once again tragedy strikes and leaves behind broken and empty people.
And despite all this Mendes says he does not hold a grudge against America, simply that he is drawn to turning a magnifying glass on the darker corners where people are caught between going with the flow and risking going under if they go against the tide.
Mendes work in many was is similar to the likes of Cathy Come Home and Saturday Night, Sunday Morning and others in the groundswell of films emerging in the 60's and 70's that looked for the struggles hidden in plane sight and those that stirred just behind the surface of the twentieth century family ideal.
Coming next for Mendes is Away We Go and once more it seems he's itching to scratch away to find what lies under those dreams again.
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