Culture Vultures: Ars Suburbia
Steyn, Mark
CULTURE VULTURES by Mark Steyn Ars Suburbia I confess I've always had a soft spot for Sam Mendes, the Oscar-nominated director of the Oscar-nominated American Beauty. I make my living saying...
...When Dmitri Tiomkin won an Oscar for the score to The High and The Mighty in 1954, he said, "I would like to thank my colleagues Brahms, Bach, Beethoven...
...I love going to New Hampshire's small Main Street movie houses —like the Jax in Littleton, the Plymouth Theatre, the Nugget in Hanover—but, for the most part, you can only see American Beauty in soulless boxes beached in the middle of strip malls on44 If he and American Beauty pull off their Oscars, it'll be the unlikeliest Best Film winner in years...
...The guy salivates over a nymphet—like James Mason in Lolita...
...Muzak...
...17 the edge of the ghastly non-communities the film professes to deplore...
...It feels like it was directed by a fellow in brand-new patent leathers that still pinch...
...The daughter is sullen and uncommunicative...
...But aside from that, American Beauty is not just an assault on the emptiness of the American Dream, it's an assault on the emptiness of the American Dream by a foreigner...
...This is my neighborhood, this is my street, this is my life," says Lester expressionlessly, as the camera closes in from the skies on the neighborhood, the street, the front doorbehind which he has built a life...
...Spielberg told him: "Just trust your instincts and wear comfortable shoes...
...Sort of makes "Ozzie and Harriet" look adventurous by comparison...
...Actually, there's already a dark version of Oliver...
...I don't quite know why I wrote that last sentence, but it's become one of the things people always mention about Sam Mendes...
...But Mendes and his screenwriter, Alan Ball (of TV's "Cybill"), intentionally or otherwise, have done a Pleasantville in reverse: Instead of dumping some go's characters in a 5o's sitcom, they've taken some characters from a 5o's sitcom and dumped them in the go's...
...If the problem with suburbs is that you have to drive everywhere, then why is the motion picture business determined to make strolling to the movies all but impossible...
...Incidentally, if the film industry is so anti-suburbs, why doesn't it stop putting up Multiplexes there...
...If you're the chap from Doylestown, skip that sentence, too...
...I hissed, happy to be Fred but drawing the line at Ginger...
...That war's long over and Hollywood won...
...For all I know he's upgraded to Cameron Diaz or Gwyneth Paltrow by now...
...Of course, I don't know that...
...But the 50's are such a soft target that hot new directors can launch an Oscar-winning career just by saying the same things everyone's said a thousand times...
...Our last glimpse of the Emcee is as a shaven-head pink-triangled prisoner en route to the gas chamber...
...As to the cutaway buttocks, you probably don't remember those from the origMARK STEYN is theater critic of the New Criterion and movie critic of the Spectator of London...
...There's all the sexual liberation you could want...
...Several London critics singled me out as one of the highlights of the evening, and, if it takes dancing cheek to cheek with a man with rouged nipples and cutaway buttocks for me to get a decent review, so be it...
...If anyone's trapped in dull conformity, it's them...
...That's probably the way it ought to be...
...When I first encountered him, he was the chubby fellow dating Caro, the press agent at the ,2 Royal Shakespeare Company...
...So this year they'll be honoring a film whose view of American life is supposed to be sharp and acerbic, but instead patronizes its characters (a cardinal sin) and is mainly a compendium of clichés from a thousand other films...
...However, none of these various achievements —Oliver, Calista, Tom—compare to what he's on the verge of accomplishing...
...She's a 40-year old woman in 1999...
...The American Spectator • April 2 0 0 0 37 The bad news is most movie and theater types subscribe to all the usual left-wing pieties...
...Naturally, the bigots in the town start devising "NO COLOREDS" regulations...
...In Pleasantville, for example, the go's high-school tramp starts deflowering the clean-cut back-porch white-bread sexless types and, suddenly, they begin turning from black-and-white to full color...
...The high point of his day, he tells us (and shows us), is masturbating in the shower...
...Anyway, Mendes attracted the attention of Cats impresario Cameron Mackintosh, who signed him for a splashy West End revival of Oliver...
...Traditionally, come Oscar time, Hollywood likes to display its serious side, by honoring challenging, probing films about controversial issues everyone either already agrees on or couldn't care less about, usually involving awful Brits—either toffs (Titanic), soldiers (The English Patient), colonial authorities (Gandhi), or Nazis (a bit of a stretch, but most of the ones in Schindler's List were played by Brits...
...But at that long-ago opening night none of us knew about it, until at the top of the second act the Emcee, played by Alan Cumming, came mincing out and beckoned me out on the floor to dance with him...
...I'm 42 years old," continues Lester...
...I make my living saying beastly things about people, but, like most critics, I pine for someone to say something nice about me...
...Perhaps I should have alerted you earlier...
...Then he Sam Mendes becomes an instant Hollywood Beauty...
...For those who haven't seen it, American Beauty is not the work of a man who wears comfortable shoes...
...People marry and divorce and screw around and shack up and have kids and turn gay at will...
...That's a good joke to come up with, and no professional writer should throw it away because of politics...
...It was supposedly a "dark" version of Oliver!, if you can imagine such a thing...
...That's a view of history that most on the left strongly object to, and I don't suppose it's the point Mendes wanted to make, but he wound up making it by accident...
...On Oscar night, Sam Mendes should thank his (uncredited) colleagues Billy Wilder, Stanley Kubrick, Steven Soderbergh...
...I was gratified by the huge roar of approval from the glittering first-night crowd...
...the sheer ugliness of a world that's elevated self-gratification above all else...
...The tough-as-nails military homophobe next door is, of course, a closet fag...
...Lester's essentially Darren from "Bewitched" after the magic's gone out of his marriage...
...Let me lead," Cumming whispered in my ear...
...Those suburbs are the ones where life is truly barren...
...In the Mendes version, you're left with the feeling that the decadence of the Weimar Republic led to the rise of Hitler—in other words, that moral abandon inevitably provides a pretext for a backlash...
...In other words, a typically dysfunctional American community...
...Elvis was in the army before she was born...
...Forget it...
...It's called Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens...
...Whether or not American Beauty is anti-American, it's certainly anti-'burb, and therefore, given that more Americans live in the suburbs than live in either town or country, it's implicitly anti-audience...
...There's a bit of Sex, Lies and Videotape, a soupcon of Reflections in a Golden Eye...
...Who'd believe in 2000 they'd still be making films about stultifying 1950's conformity and sexual liberation...
...But Steven Spielberg happened to be in town making Saving Private Ryan, enjoyed the production, made a mental note of Mendes's name, and three years later invited him to lunch...
...But, from the kick-off, Mendes's revival is so exhaustively decadent that, though set 8o years ago in the Weimar Republic, it manages to include a gay sex act which, according to authorities in the field, wasn't invented until 1969...
...But that's not the way Hollywood sees it...
...It was an interesting example of the way Mendes's enthusiasms sometimes run away with him...
...It's narrated by a corpse—like William Holden in Sunset Boulevard...
...is that it's the light version of Oliver Twist, and at the London Palladium it somehow defied Mendes's efforts to him it into a Dickensian Cabaret...
...The point about Oliver...
...By the way, if you're the reader from Doylestown, PA, who accused me of being a homosexual because I enjoyed George Dubya Bush putting his hand on my back, you should probably skip the preceding paragraph...
...But interestingly, for all Pleasantvillepreaches the virtues of self-liberation from picket-fence coziness, it's the opening scenes, set in the here and now, that have the most impact—the teacher reporting the HIV statistics...
...If he and American Beauty pull off their Academy Awards, it'll be the unlikeliest Best Film winner in years...
...At this year's ceremony, American Beauty could be the first Oscar-winner that's indistinguishable from the montage salute to Hollywood greats...
...Whether they're any happier for throwing off the shackles of Eisenhower's America for the louche pleasures of Clinton's America is a moot point, and given the mountain of human wreckage piled up in the last 3o years, one worth exploring...
...If she was truly suburban, she'd like awful Celine ballads or Mariah Carey or some other wretched, overwrought, soft-rock coffee-table CD pap...
...38 April 2000 • The American Spectator...
...He spent New Year's Eve on Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman's yacht in Sydney Harbor...
...Generally speaking, nothing makes Hollywood feel better than a stroll down memory lane for a heartwarming story in which the characters you root for stand in opposition to the moral nullity of the British...
...In a way, I'm dead already...
...But fortunately he's taken a yen to his daughter's cheerleader friend, a blonde nymphet called Angela...
...Besides, it makes the point that there were those excluded from the small-town TV utopias...
...A trance-like, flat-voiced, self-consciously stylized meditation on American life, it's one of those screen debuts where the more filmic the director tries to be the more theatrical he seems...
...But Hollywood's like those ancient Japs holed up in the jungle still fighting the last war...
...inal 1966 Broadway production or Bob Fosse's 1972 film...
...Conversely, the apparent psycho turns out to be a ruminatively philosophical drug dealer...
...His wife Carolyn, played by Annette Bening, is an icily neurotic real-tor obsessed with materialism at its most trivial: The handle on her pruning shears matches her gardening boots...
...While Spielberg was sipping his way through a murky health shake, the cocky young Englishman said: "So how do you do it then, this movie directing thing...
...In less than a year, I'll be dead...
...So here we are on the eve of the Oscars, and, although it's true that you can never really guarantee the results—what with the Academy's strange electoral college and the inclination of its older members to let their wives (trophy or otherwise) and gardeners fill in the ballot—Mendes is as near as we ever get to a comfortable shoo-in...
...ave Mendes and Ball ever been to a suburb in the last quarter-century...
...But, although this is Mendes and Ball's first film, they're happy to serve up the same old line Hollywood's been peddling for decades...
...This year, for some reason, they seem to have got it all backwards: Some Brits turned up to flay Americans for their own moral nullity...
...Lester is one of those characters who knows enough to hate himself and to despise those around him for failing to have reached that advanced state...
...In the '66 and '72 versions, Cabaret's characters are mildly bohemian types who get swept up in the turmoil of Hitler's rise to power...
...It's been a meteoric rise...
...Since then, he's been linked with Calista Flock-hart, who plays the carnivorous if cadaverous Ally McBeal...
...A snotty Brit who's never made a film before...
...As for Carolyn, we know she's stunted and suburban because she likes Muzak...
...the good news is they're not very good at selling them...
...And, instead of being heartwarming, there are no characters to root for and the whole thing's wall-to-wall nihilism...
...Its protagonist—"hero" is hardly the word—is Lester Burnham, played by Kevin Spacey, who works for an advertising trade magazine and comes home every night to—what else?— a hollow, loveless, lifeless existence in the suburbs...
...Oh, pardon me, it's actually set in ...well, whatever this decade's called, the Noughts, the Double-Zeros...
...As in Cabaret, their sense of showmanship gets the better of them...
...By a snotty Brit...
...36 April 2000 • The American Spectator moved on to Jane Horrocks, who plays Bubble on Absolutely Fabulous...
...And just about the only good reviews I've ever had came six or so years ago at the first night of Mendes's revival of Cabaret at the Donmar Warehouse in London...
...Sex will liberate him from his dull, dead 195o's conformity...
...As visitors to the New York production will be aware, there's a clear and present danger of audience participation...
...the divorced couple, neither of whom want the kid for the weekend...
Vol. 33 • April 2000 • No. 3
