An alarming lesson from two films by Sam Mendes a decade apart and which, for me, remain his two finest pieces of cinematic work: American Beauty and Revolutionary Road.
In both films, the protagonists, the anti-hero(ine)s are depicted immaculately by two actors at the height of their power: Kevin Spacey and Kate Winslet (Q: why on earth are all the accolades bestowed on her this year for the mediocre The Reader instead? A: Welcome to Hollywood.). The two characters who reject the prescribed pattern of life and make an ultimately futile attempt at seeking out an alternative, in their vastly different manners and eras, both end in death. Those left behind to cling on to the banalities-disguised-as-securities (or, as the mentally disturbed John in Revolution Road so brilliantly summarised, the 'hopeless emptiness') they had considered so important know that the rest of their days will be lived out in inescapable misery, that there will be no redemption in the form of material gains by any earthly measure. Dicaprio's Frank Wheeler was given a chance at becoming something different, at achieving something closer to emotional and intellectual fulfillment. There was no guarantee that this alternative route would lead to great enlightenment or any more familiar form of eternal happiness. What there was was the complete unknown, whereas the known would only map out the rest of his life in one paralysingly tangible direction.
Frank chose the latter with no hesitation. All the dithering that he displayed in front of April was pure show for her sake. She refused to go on living the perfectly ordinary (it really is deeply imprinted in so many of us that ordinariness is a virtue by default, isn't it) life with him and, under the circumstances, her only option of being extra-ordinary was to abandon this life altogether. Which she did. Kevin Spacey's Lester Burnham was of course murdered by his raging neighbour in the end, but that unforgettable smirk on his dead face led us to think that he was somehow complicit in his own death, that this was his only way out of his version of the hopeless emptiness, the endless banalities that seemed to define his life.
Some have suggested that Mendes ought to make one more film to complete his trilogy of American suburbia parables. I do hope he's not dispirited by the fact that Revolutionary Road (which offers more depth and nuance than all other American films I saw last year put together) was almost completely overlooked by the Academy. I, for one, shall look forward to the final instalment of the trilogy eagerly, as I am to his Bridge Project on the Old Vic stage later this year.
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