American Beauty.

Review #2328: American Beauty.

Cast: 

Kevin Spacey (Lester Burnham), Annette Bening (Carolyn Burnham), Thora Birch (Jane Burnham), Wes Bentley (Ricky Fitts), Mena Suvari (Angela Hayes), Peter Gallagher (Buddy Kane), Allison Janney (Barbara Fitts), Chris Cooper (Col. Frank Fitts), Scott Bakula (Jim Olmeyer), and Sam Robards (Jim Berkley) Directed by Sam Mendes (#572 - Skyfall, #1585 - 1917, #1891 - Spectre)

Review: 

"If you are doing a play or a film, you have to have a secret way in if you are directing it. Sometimes it’s big things. American Beauty, for me, was about my adolescence."

It isn't every day you get a movie with a lead presence who throws away his responsibilities to go on a quest to maybe get with a much, much younger woman. To start, the movie was written by Alan Ball, the playwright-turned TV writer on the sitcoms Grace Under Fire and Cybill. The Atlanta native, frustrated by his work on those shows, tried to get into film. One of the scripts he would write was cribbed from a play idea he had come up and discarded, with the passion and "anger and rage at my working situation" resulting in a script that Dreamworks Pictures liked. There were numerous inspirations: one was the media circus surrounding the Amy Fisher trial (in which a 17-year old severely wounded the wife of a man she had a sexual relationship when still underage that saw her nicknamed the "Long Island Lolita"), and the other was an actual experience involving a plastic bag that he followed intently for 10 minutes (of course, his Buddhist faith played an influence too, where he was once quoted talking about a notion of "the miraculous within the mundane"). As strange as it sounds, it really was a script that wound up directed by a first-time filmmaker in Sam Mendes, who at the time had just done a revival of the musical Cabaret (interestingly, Mendes had Spacey and Bening in mind from the beginning). Present for rewrites during production (such as excising particular aspects of the ending), Mendes and Ball would each win an Academy Award that yer (television viewers might recognize that afterwards, Ball wound up creating Six Feet Under and True Blood).  

Hell, I suppose you could say that there is a beauty that is ironed out of people by culture, experience, or, well, conformity. Satire, psychological drama, whatever one calls the movie, it certainly is one that has managed to endure in the strange sphere of movies that some people really, really liked 25 years ago and others that, well, thought it was aging terribly by the years that went by (it most certainly is not the worst Best Picture winner when stuff like Cavalcade and Chariots of Fire exists). "Is that all there is?" isn't exactly the freshest premise, admittedly, because you could gleam that in another 1999 movie with Fight Club (which in perhaps a mirror of this film went from polarized reviews to a cult following in its 25 years of life) or even with Office Space. The times shifted fast on this film to a bizarro world where cynicism runs deep and the profound now reeks of pretentiousness. The facades that folks found funny to point at now just seem hollow in their barbs. Esteemed people of their age (insert any Administration of the past few decades) now resemble ghoulish relics. The taboos of older years are now stuff you may wish to bleach from your eyes on Twitter (or, for those with certain tastes, bookmark like a chipmunk), while others on social media seem to believe that their county and political values should be like of the old movies they watched as a youth. I think you get the idea, but I will say this much: the movie is kind of funny to me in that strange way that comes in facades and soap-opera weirdness. It narrates itself as if was Sunset Boulevard (1950), complete with strange self-importance and a worthwhile look (as shot by the famed Conrad L. Hall) of suburban facades.

I interpreted Spacey's performance as one that believe he is in on the joke of someone looking for meaning by basically reverting to a man-child. He trades one sense of totems for other totems in an amusing manner that is actually quite pathetic when you really get down to it. It isn't a role with any sense of dignity to it, but trying to re-invent oneself in the throes of balding hair and flabby nature is strangely enduring ot the now. I may not care for the man or his character, but I don't have to be to get a few chuckles at the pursuit of what one believes to be beauty. Honestly, Bening is the more interesting presence because somehow, her type-A personality facade is really, really amusing to me. It probably is represented best when one sees at her job in which she repeats the sentence "I will sell this house today" on a compulsive level that only makes the punchline (for all the facades one can put up, it all goes to shit in the face of looking closer) all the more amusing. Really, there may be a bit of the Burnhams in the people we may see every day, as that song by the Doors goes (people are strange...). Strangely, Bentley and Birch don't really have as much as impact as I thought they might have done for a movie that starts itself with the two of them for a moment that comes right back to the climax. It's just a couple of adrift youth that try to stake the waters between the ordinary and what is "interesting", and yeah, one gets it I suppose; Suvari may be played as an object, but her facade is at least obvious enough to be played to an actual conclusion. Besides, the brazen vulnerabilities that lie beneath the facade played by Cooper and Janney are far more compelling in those unspoken moments each has on screen (the latter basically seems to be as distant as a wide painting). In general, it is a movie that is shallow and yet somehow fascinating to see for the time it was made in, one in which it tries to make some sort of statement about the beauty of things that lie beneath the surface that have been left adrift in a time where people's pursuit for things and facades have only made one see the film as ridiculous rather than profound. Well-made and weirdly amusing, it is a movie that could only come from the turn of one millennium into another.

Overall, I give it 7 out of 10 stars.

Patriot Games.

Review #1847: Patriot Games.

Cast: 

Harrison Ford (Jack Ryan), Anne Archer (Cathy Ryan), Patrick Bergin (Kevin O'Donnell), Sean Bean (Sean Miller), Thora Birch (Sally Ryan), James Fox (Lord William Holmes), Ellen Geer (Rose), Samuel L. Jackson (Lt. Commander Robby Jackson), Polly Walker (Annette), J. E. Freeman (Marty Cantor), James Earl Jones (Admiral James Greer), Richard Harris (Paddy O'Neil), Alex Norton (Dennis Cooley), Hugh Fraser (Geoffrey Watkins), Alun Armstrong (Sergeant Owens), and David Threlfall (Inspector Robert Highland) Directed by Phillip Noyce.

Review: 

In 1984, Tom Clancy wrote The Hunt for Red October, the first novel in what became his most notable line of books with the character of Jack Ryan, one that saw him take a "play by the rules" approach to showing and getting certain details correctly that he felt was a moral obligation to his readers that made him one of the noted espionage writers of his time. Up until his death, he wrote sixteen further novels in what is referred to as the "Ryanverse" (Patriot Games, published in 1987, happens to serve as a "prequel", oddly enough); the book series has been continued by further writers with the support of the Clancy estate. That first book was adapted into a film in 1990 with Alec Baldwin as the lead character and John McTiernan as director that was most noted for its other main star in Sean Connery. At any rate, the success of the film meant that the filmmakers (producer Mace Neufeld, who optioned the first novel after reading proofs in 1985) wanted to make another feature quickly. However, Baldwin elected to star in a Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire rather than reprise the title role (which he did not regret, as Paramount producer David Kirkpatrick forced him to pick between the two, for which Baldwin later described him as a "beady-eyed, untalented fool"). Phillip Noyce was recruited to direct the film to replace McTiernan, who wanted to adapt Clear and Present Danger with a script by John Milius; he apparently felt uncomfortable as an Irish American directing a movie with IRA characters (he proceeded to direct Medicine Man instead). He was known for films such as Newsfront (1978) and Dead Calm (1989), but Ford's appreciation of seeing the former film is what got him to endorse Noyce. W. Peter Iliff and Donald E. Stewart (who had wrote the screenplay of the first film) wrote the film, with later un-credited rewrites done by Steven Zaillian. A cursory reading will reveal gradual differences: for one, the assassination attempt involved the Prince and Princess of Wales rather than a fictional lord (complete with Ryan getting a knighthood) that sees him deal not only with a splinter group of the Provisional Irish Republican Army but also "the Movement" (a black domestic terrorist group). I guess having a climax involving Ryan and company (including the Prince!) fighting a kidnap attempt at his house that sees the authorities round up the remaining terrorists for arrest seemed just a tad much (the earlier movie was mostly faithful despite considerable technical changes). 

Before release, Clancy denounced the changes made from adapting his book to film but seeing a rough cut had him say that there was “some good things in the movie"; on June 5, 1992, the movie came out to considerable box office success, which meant that Noyce and Ford would return for Clear and Present Danger (1994). Whether one has watched The Hunt for Red October or not doesn't really matter much, as one would hope from a film series with a sense of calmness and tension about international affairs (a professor and analyst played by Ford? No sweat). For a 117-minute trip, it generally works out for the best with a useful cast and semi-solid plot foundation. If you didn't know, the character of Jack Ryan in his appeal is the fact that he is an everyman kind of lead focus, an analyst rather than an action hero who only gets involved because his family is involved (the assassination attempt in the beginning of the film happens to occur when Ryan is with his wife and kid, for example). In that sense, Ford (approaching the age of fifty at the time of production) is appropriate here, because he gets to play family man alongside the occasional action beat without seeming hamstrung by boredom, while Archer and Birch make for fair contributors to a solid family triangle. Bean makes a decent adversary to go alongside him, filled with fanatical energy that (intentional or not) overshadows anything done by his adversary partner in Bergin or with Geer. Others are there for cursory moments here and there, whether that involves a young Jackson or Jones returning from the previous 1990 film or Harris, a bewildering choice. The use of technology with survey satellites and heat-sensitive photography when scouting the camp is fairly interesting to see play out among other scenes of "analysis" and thriller parts (the assassination scene along with the rescue of Bean from a van are noteworthy, even if the latter might be privy to realism). Of course, the climax is a bit forced, because the studio had them change the original intended climax of an underwater fight near rocks to what became a boat chase, which is only slightly easier to see when one is fighting someone in a rainstorm. Really it just reminds me that even Thunderball (1965) knew better than to have a boat-fight be in the dark. At any rate, the movie doesn't lose its footing when sticking the general landing, setting the stage for other possible peeks into the Ryan window without begging for anything.

Overall, I give it 7 out of 10 stars.