Sam Mendes’ films are as handsomely-mounted as they are facile; as broadly-appealing to a specific demographic as they are off-putting to another. He’s a lauded theater director who made a splash with his feature debut, American Beauty (1999), nominated for eight Oscars and winning five of them: Best Picture, Best Actor (for the since-cancelled Kevin Spacey), Best Cinematography (for the great Conrad Hall), Best Screenplay for Alan Ball and Best Director for Mendes himself. An auspicious beginning he hasn’t matched in the twenty years since. In the interim, he helmed six pictures, including two in the James Bond franchise, that whatever their relative merits revealed Mendes as an artist mainly interested in the celebration, even sanctification, of specific male savior fantasies. He’s not unusual in this regard, of course, sharing a fanbase with contemporary filmmakers like Christopher Nolan and Zach Snyder. But where those other guys seem driven by passionate, if sometimes misguided, purpose, there’s something about Mendes that I find to be pandering and inauthentic.
Consider how American Beauty privileges his schlub hero Lester’s desires while mocking his wife, Carolyn’s (Annette Bening). His acquisition of a dream car and dream date is poignant grist for his journey of discovery, while her nice sofa and desperate affair are seen as not just pathetic but also grist for Lester’s journey of discovery. What remains engaging about the film is the subplot concerning the young voyeur Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley) who captures with his video camera, a plastic bag caught in a wind eddy. The suggestion is that in 1999, truth is held in video, digital, images while film is now the province of delusion and deception. The decade of the ’90s were one where digital manipulation had finally advanced to the point of photo-realism. Forrest Gump (1994) inserted Tom Hanks into key events of history, and James Cameron’s Titanic (1997) raised the old lady from the briny depths just to sink her again. Film became unstable, untruthful. See also American Beauty‘s celebration of the death of film’s relationship with truth, the first intimation of the seamless digital trickery (shot by Roger Deakins on an Arri Alexa Mini-LF) that seems the entire purpose of 1917.
Road to Perdition, hotly-anticipated upon its release in 2002, garnered a strong critical response but a relatively-tepid box office return given its inflated budget. It won another Oscar for Conrad Hall, but failed to earn Mendes nominations for director and picture. The film is beautiful to look at, just as all of Mendes’ films are beautiful to look at, evidence of Mendes’ wisdom in choosing the best cinematographers in the business: Hall (twice), Deakins (four times) and Ellen Kuras (twice). It tells the story of a lachrymose hitman (Hanks) and his young son as he hunts son of a mob boss Connor (a pre-Bond Daniel Craig) while trying to avoid perverse crime scene photographer Maguire (Jude Law). The presence of an evil shutterbug as the real villain of the piece marks the second consecutive film in which a camera and its wielder become an avatar for Mendes’ thoughts about the power of looking, as well as how they’re colored by the medium used to do so. If he’s cribbing from Hitchcock’s ideas about the director as voyeur — and both Ricky Fitts and Maguire are voyeurs — then the conclusion we draw is that these characters are stand-ins for Mendes, himself. I’m reminded most by Mendes’ films of Thomas Mann’s image of an unmanned camera left on a beach to continue to observe, senselessly, after its possessor dies. His films are pretty. It’s curious to me how light they feel no matter how grave their subject.
His first shot at a war film next with Jarhead (2005), an adaptation of Anthony Swofford’s Operations Desert Shield memoir starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a Marine sniper disappointed by the end of that conflagration because he never had a chance to fire his rifle. A sniper scope takes the place of a camera this time around, as the hero Swofford (Gyllenhaal) and his spotter Troy (Peter Sarsgaard) do their best to fight off ennui and disillusionment as soldiers in a meaningless engagement. Mendes followed the disappointing critical and public reception for Jarhead with another adaptation, this time of Richard Yates’ interpersonal drama Revolutionary Road. Then, just a year later, another, slightly funnier, interpersonal drama Away We Go (2009). Both films are formal, airless. Revolutionary Road (2008) is airless in a book club prestige sort of way, and Away We Go in a “going for Cameron Crowe but coming up Zach Braff” sort of way. Neither are complete disasters, but both reveal Mendes as a good technical director who seems to have a problem finding the humanity in human interactions. I think it’s weird that one film deals with a tragic home abortion and the other with a pitable vignette about a series of miscarriages. Mendes isn’t good with women and these issues require a different touch.
While clearly not an action director, Mendes seemed a good fit for the James Bond franchise — invested as it is in conservative male power trips and cardboard character types. Predictably two of the prettiest films in the James Bond universe, Skyfall (2012) and Spectre (2015) are both crippled by grave attempts to insert humanity through hackneyed symbolism and stock masterplots. Particularly jarring is his treatment of Judi Dench’s “M” character whom Bond refers to as a “bitch” in Skyfall, and that film’s Eve (Naomi Harris) who, after getting rattled, almost kills our hero through her incompetence.
I actually find myself liking the less-liked of the two, Spectre – just as I like Road to Perdition probably the most of his films – for its nihilistic suggestion that Bond (Daniel Craig) has had a procedure inflicted upon him that makes it impossible for him to see faces. When he emerges from it and recognizes his “girl” immediately, many took it as evidence that continuity had been betrayed. I took it as evidence that Mendes was following through with his career-long thesis that women are there for the embellishment of men and, really, any woman will do. The metaphor for sight as a mute, insensible machinery of conveyance in Mendes’ films now finds its full flower in 1917, the picture poised to win the Best Picture Oscar for Mendes again on the 20th anniversary of his first triumph. It is very much the movie Ricky Fitts would have made of WWI: making much of the beautiful emptiness of a plastic bag caught in a draft but framed as art and, even worse, great philosophy. I think it’ll win because the demographic who Mendes gratifies with these stories of men suffering greatly and overcoming hardships are, perhaps not coincidentally, the same ones who hold the voting majority. I hope I’m wrong.
Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due in 2020. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.
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The Films Of Sam Mendes Are Just Like That Floating Plastic Bag In 'American Beauty': Beautiful Yet Empty - Decider
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