Dec 20, 2022·edited Dec 20, 2022Liked by Alan Scherstuhl, Scott Tobias
Me thought Away We Go was enjoyable fluff, largely because me had lot of goodwill towards leads. Until me got to head-smackingly bad ending (spoiler for 13-year-old movie you not should watch if you not have already seen it:) After seemingly finding comfortable home with Jim From Office's brother and his daughter, who Maya Rudolph have instant rapport with, they abruptly leave and Rudolph says, "well... me guess we could maybe live in gigantic beautiful old house me own and not have mentioned before now, last ten minutes of movie." What?!?
Anyway, me do think there certainly place for director like Mendes who visually gifted but have nothing to say. And Bond movies are exactly that place. But what he should do beyond that, me not could tell you. Maybe a Star Trek? Another franchise where sensibilities are firmly locked in place, but right director can give series shot in arm? (me still think Justin Lim's Star Trek Beyond is unfairly overlooked as one of best entries in series)
That review has a killer one-line takedown of Mendes, too: "a literary tourist from Britain who has missed the point every time he has crossed the ocean."
Me love Star Trek Beyond, only moreso as time goes on because if that's the end of theatrical Trek, at least we ended on an up note as opposed to Nemesis.
Sure sure, but speaking in the present tense I don't think a fourth movie in the Kelvin timeline happens, I don't think anybody has any idea where to go next, and they seem to have finally figured out (again) how to make it work on television, so as near as I can see I feel safe saying Beyond was the last new Star Trek movie we'll see for some time.
Funny, was just thinking about Away We Go. At first, I remembered it’s worst sin being wasting a bunch of very talented people’s time on a first draft script, but then I remembered the pole dance sequence. If that movie had come out today, Mendez and co would rightly be run out of town on a rail.
One of my foremost theatrical memories, for better or worse, is driving to Bismarck, ND (about an hour and a half) to see The Hurt Locker and Away We Go with my dad. I loved The Hurt Locker, he didn't, and he loved Away We Go while I didn't. We listened to Filmspotting's reviews of both on the way home and then got into such a heated debate that the last hour or so of the trip felt like three.
Say what you will about American Beauty, and I haaaate that movie, but at least it's pretty enough to look at. Away We Go can't boast that.
I’m curious how much of American Beauty’s problematic emptiness is the fault of Alan Ball’s script, or if another director might have made something more substantial of it.
Me feel like it last refuge of scoundrel where screenwriters are concerned. "Huh, maybe this idea not really enough to sustain entire movie. What if me threw in... murder?!?" (See also, Art School Confidential, final season of L Word, and no doubt countless other examples)
Bingo. He doesnt have to die for thematic or plot-related reasons, he has to die so the camera can fly over the neighborhood and Alan Ball can blow everybody’s wigs off with his dead-guy narrator.
Oh Jesus Christ, I had almost forgotten about Art School Confidential. It was the first movie I ever saw at NYC’s Angelika, in back-to-back double feature with The Proposition, which overshadowed Art School in my memory almost completely.
I didn't see either of those at the Angelika, but I did see Finding Neverland there in a very uncrowded house, where my little group had a funny and pleasant interaction with Hilary Swank and Chad Lowe.
Allegedly, American Beauty was written first with the framing narrative of the daughter (Thora Birch character, ___ Burnham) and Ricky... Fitz? aka the Creepy Neighbor kid *ON TRIAL FOR THE MURDER OF LESTER BURNHAM*... so, as crazy as it seems, the path to making this a movie actually made it (arguably) better material than what was there originally... again, allegedly.
I'm very skeptical that ANY director could have made a good movie out of this without major rewrites, or at least a Starship Troopers style subversion. As a lot of people say, the central message of "... but what if people in the suburbs are ACTUALLY UNHAPPY!?" is the tiredest of tired cliches, even by 1999. And also, can we talk for a minute about how Lester spends most of the movie lusting after a high schooler? To be fair, the movie thinks this isn't great, and Lester doesn't actually act on it when he's given the chance. But I'm not sure the movie realizes quite how gross this is and what it says about Lester.
Great essay, Scott! I doubt you're the only one with regrets about praise for American Beauty -- that seems like a pretty universal feeling. I somehow have avoided most of his later films, even though I have a blu-ray of 1917 in my stack of unwatched disks. As for Empire of Light, it sure LOOKS like the sort of movie I'd eat up -- but the trailers and commercials for it have been so opaque that I've never worked up any enthusiasm to see it. Even in that limited form, there just doesn't seem to be any life there.
One copy-editing quibble (and feel free to edit this out of my comment once you correct it if you have that capability) -- the Bong Joon-ho film from 2019 is Parasite, not Paradise. Damn you, Autocorrect!!
The unearned patina of American Beauty pervades his whole filmography. He can thank Hall and Thomas Newman’s enormous contributions for his entire career, which so far has produced no good movies while winning seemingly every major award. 1917, his best movie, is a dumb stunt with nothing to say about war, a finely-made and bone-stupid action movie for people who think they’re too smart for action movies. It’s like he wanted to make a World War 2 movie but the wrong truckload of props showed up and he just shrugged and proceeded apace.
Skyfall is stupid and somehow good but is a James Bond movie, which are different than regular movies so it doesn’t count. All of the rest of his stuff is well-tooled crap. His mediocrity is at its most impressive in Road to Perdition, where he somehow made a bad movie out of uniformly good parts. I don’t know what the problem is with that movie, I don’t think anybody really does, but who gives a crap about it? Who gives a crap about anything he’s done? Jarhead made 100 million dollars and doesn’t even exist.
I guess if I were going to make a case for Mendes - bracketing out his stage work, which I've never seen but I've heard a lot of it is pretty great - it would lean heavily on ROAD TO PERDITION, which doesn't get a lot of attention here. You can pick on the script for its adherence to a few gangster-flick chestnuts, but the film features a hall-of-fame cast doing stellar work, balanced by tons of Greek-tragic atmosphere and quite a few shots that are seared into my memory (I've probably only watched it once since it came out in 2002, but Mendes and Conrad Hall really outdid themselves.)
I don't love his Bond films - mostly for script rather than directorial reasons - and I can't say that I ever think about JARHEAD or REVOLUTIONARY ROAD or AWAY WE GO. I don't know that 1917 is, like, a top-tier war film or that it has anything significant to say about war, but it was a gripping experience and a super-subjective imagining of WWI in particular does seem to me like a project worth doing. (As someone who was a s%&thead college freshman at the time it was released, AMERICAN BEAUTY played a distressingly large part in my young-adult identity formation, something I'm still trying to atone for.)
Anyway, I've always wanted Mendes and Joe Wright to, at least once after their promising first 1-2 films, find collaborators who temper their ponderousness and high-concept cleverness into something great, and they never really have, and so everything's stayed in that B-minus-to-B-plus spectrum for them both.
Road to Perdition sure seems like a good movie. It definitely thinks it is. He hired the best cameraman and the greatest American actor of all time, and Tom Hanks and Jennifer Jason Leigh are in it too. The script makes sense. It has nicely-lit rain and tommy guns and old cars and fedoras, which are all good things to have in a movie. Even if it were stupid, which it isn’t, it should at least be fun or interesting. And yet, who loves it? Does anybody even care about it? Mendes whiffing on that cannot-miss movie is like a perverse demonstration of close-up magic.
I'd agree that RtP is shockingly forgettable but there's no need to pretend that it doesn't have its fans; plenty of glowing reviews on Letterboxed and out there in the world.
Fair enough, but I genuinely never hear anybody who loves movies talk about it. I don’t ever go on letterboxed so I can’t speak to that. The reviews were pretty good, but they’re usually pretty good for him. I’m sure it’s lots of people’s favorite movie, I just don’t know any of them.
I remember enjoying Road to Perdition when I saw it, but the only time I've had the urge to return to it is a bit of curiosity to see Superman as a boy. (Tyler Hoechlin, the kid, now plays a damn good Superman on the CW show.) On the other hand, I'd be happy to reread the Max Allen Collins/Richard Piers Rayner comic or its follow-ups anytime.
God, I remember falling so hard for American Beauty in college. Very odd time.
Oh, and while his Bond movies aren't bad (well, I've only managed to get through Skyfall), it's telling that they're just as empty as everything else he makes. Like, Skyfall is gorgeous and fun to watch, but it has an air of being About Something, when it absolutely isn't; just a vague nostalgia for "Britain" or something, and a lot of story beats stolen from other movies. I realize it's bizarre to criticize a Bond movie for being thematically bereft, but Mendes has the unfortunate curse of being a shallow artist who's convinced he has things to say, and that's not really something you can escape, regardless of context. (Besides, as clunky as Casino Royale could be, it at least tried to make Bond human. Skyfall is mostly just "hey, wouldn't it be nice to have a male M again?")
He’s a shallow man but doesn’t know it, which is why his genre films are pretty good but any project of his that feels like it’s going for depth is actually just kind of embarrassing and meaningless.
I kind of equate him with Adam McKay and Todd Phillips who similarly demand to be taken seriously recently, to disastrous results imo.
I rewatched Skyfall recently and did not have as good a time as I thought I would. I think it suffers from a lot of the same issues as the rest of Craig’s Bond films--overlong, overserious--and Bardem’s character reads more like a Batman villain, to the point where his whole scheme is lifted right out of the Joker’s plot from the Dark Knight. That said, the parts that work *really* work, and I can see why people love it.
Somebody else here beat me to the Joker observation. I’m glad franchise films have moved out of the Dark Knight’s shadow, I feel like we had villains intentionally getting get caught every other week for a while there.
Having never seen American Beauty, my first introduction to the plastic bag nonsense was Not Another Teen Movie. When I discovered it was real, I was flabbergasted.
Dec 20, 2022·edited Dec 20, 2022Liked by Scott Tobias
ROAD TO PERDITION is his standout for me - I agree that it's an overly serious take on pulpy material, but THE UNTOUCHABLES (and LAST MAN STANDING, and MULHOLLAND FALLS) already exists, so I'm happy for Mendes' Oscar-bait version of fedorah-hatted shoot-em-ups being out in the world.
If I didn't live on that bit of English coast where EMPIRE OF LIGHT is set (and was filmed), I would have no interest in it whatsoever - at least, I assume no-one's going to be firing a form of machine gun in it, which is my rule of thumb in separating the watchable from the insufferable in his oeuvre.
On the one hand, I understand the praise for Skyfall, because it’s pretty entertaining, and coming off the stripped down origin story of Casino Royale and the nothing-burger of Quantum of Solace it gave franchise fans more elements of the classic Bond films they were missing.
On the other hand, Bardem’s villain is essentially a Heath Ledger Joker retread (down to the “I planned to have you incarcerate me all along!” scene), and I still can’t forgive how tasteless it is to have Berenice Marlohe’s character reveal to Bond that she’s a victim of sex trafficking in one scene and then him basically go right from hearing that to walking in on her in the shower; why even bring up the trafficking thing? Not to mention that she is then immediately murdered by Bardem in a contest with Bond apparently to decide who is the most callous male on the planet? (and yes, I recognize this plays into the established 1st-Bond-girl-to-show-up-in-film-ends-up-dead trope, but it still feels like a gross misstep to me)
I think the outstanding cinematography and cast get that one over the finish line, at least for a Bond movie, but the script is just as doofy as the other lousier entries in the Craig era.
Daniel Craig is always good, and the serious approach to his Bond made enough sense when Casino Royale came out, but he brings so much joy and mischief to things like Benoit Blanc or even hosting stupid old SNL you have to wonder what he’d have been like in Moonraker or something.
Me thought Away We Go was enjoyable fluff, largely because me had lot of goodwill towards leads. Until me got to head-smackingly bad ending (spoiler for 13-year-old movie you not should watch if you not have already seen it:) After seemingly finding comfortable home with Jim From Office's brother and his daughter, who Maya Rudolph have instant rapport with, they abruptly leave and Rudolph says, "well... me guess we could maybe live in gigantic beautiful old house me own and not have mentioned before now, last ten minutes of movie." What?!?
Anyway, me do think there certainly place for director like Mendes who visually gifted but have nothing to say. And Bond movies are exactly that place. But what he should do beyond that, me not could tell you. Maybe a Star Trek? Another franchise where sensibilities are firmly locked in place, but right director can give series shot in arm? (me still think Justin Lim's Star Trek Beyond is unfairly overlooked as one of best entries in series)
Away We Go is notable also for drawing maybe the harshest A.O. Scott review I can recall: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/05/movies/05away.html
That review has a killer one-line takedown of Mendes, too: "a literary tourist from Britain who has missed the point every time he has crossed the ocean."
Me love Star Trek Beyond, only moreso as time goes on because if that's the end of theatrical Trek, at least we ended on an up note as opposed to Nemesis.
End of theatrical Trek *for now*. Nothing with 100% name recognition ever not get rebooted by Hollywood eventually.
Sure sure, but speaking in the present tense I don't think a fourth movie in the Kelvin timeline happens, I don't think anybody has any idea where to go next, and they seem to have finally figured out (again) how to make it work on television, so as near as I can see I feel safe saying Beyond was the last new Star Trek movie we'll see for some time.
Me suspect Six Seasons and Movie for Strange New Worlds is likeliest scenario at moment.
Uft. That’s the dream.
Funny, was just thinking about Away We Go. At first, I remembered it’s worst sin being wasting a bunch of very talented people’s time on a first draft script, but then I remembered the pole dance sequence. If that movie had come out today, Mendez and co would rightly be run out of town on a rail.
Yes, thank you! I keep trying to tell people this guy is way too self-serious and fundamentally kinda sucks. He’s like a low-key Iñárritu.
Amen to this: "or it would be if he didn’t consider it so broadly, as emblematic rather than specific."
One of my foremost theatrical memories, for better or worse, is driving to Bismarck, ND (about an hour and a half) to see The Hurt Locker and Away We Go with my dad. I loved The Hurt Locker, he didn't, and he loved Away We Go while I didn't. We listened to Filmspotting's reviews of both on the way home and then got into such a heated debate that the last hour or so of the trip felt like three.
Say what you will about American Beauty, and I haaaate that movie, but at least it's pretty enough to look at. Away We Go can't boast that.
Love this, Scott.
I’m curious how much of American Beauty’s problematic emptiness is the fault of Alan Ball’s script, or if another director might have made something more substantial of it.
It always seemed to me that the climactic murder is thematically obtuse. How are Nazism and homophobia supposed to fit into the picture?
Me feel like it last refuge of scoundrel where screenwriters are concerned. "Huh, maybe this idea not really enough to sustain entire movie. What if me threw in... murder?!?" (See also, Art School Confidential, final season of L Word, and no doubt countless other examples)
Bingo. He doesnt have to die for thematic or plot-related reasons, he has to die so the camera can fly over the neighborhood and Alan Ball can blow everybody’s wigs off with his dead-guy narrator.
Oh Jesus Christ, I had almost forgotten about Art School Confidential. It was the first movie I ever saw at NYC’s Angelika, in back-to-back double feature with The Proposition, which overshadowed Art School in my memory almost completely.
Deservedly so, that movie is special. I saw both of those at the Angelika too.
I didn't see either of those at the Angelika, but I did see Finding Neverland there in a very uncrowded house, where my little group had a funny and pleasant interaction with Hilary Swank and Chad Lowe.
including a character death that wasn't truly necessary was quintessential 90s indie/ art-film. so this follows that lead
Allegedly, American Beauty was written first with the framing narrative of the daughter (Thora Birch character, ___ Burnham) and Ricky... Fitz? aka the Creepy Neighbor kid *ON TRIAL FOR THE MURDER OF LESTER BURNHAM*... so, as crazy as it seems, the path to making this a movie actually made it (arguably) better material than what was there originally... again, allegedly.
I'm very skeptical that ANY director could have made a good movie out of this without major rewrites, or at least a Starship Troopers style subversion. As a lot of people say, the central message of "... but what if people in the suburbs are ACTUALLY UNHAPPY!?" is the tiredest of tired cliches, even by 1999. And also, can we talk for a minute about how Lester spends most of the movie lusting after a high schooler? To be fair, the movie thinks this isn't great, and Lester doesn't actually act on it when he's given the chance. But I'm not sure the movie realizes quite how gross this is and what it says about Lester.
Great essay, Scott! I doubt you're the only one with regrets about praise for American Beauty -- that seems like a pretty universal feeling. I somehow have avoided most of his later films, even though I have a blu-ray of 1917 in my stack of unwatched disks. As for Empire of Light, it sure LOOKS like the sort of movie I'd eat up -- but the trailers and commercials for it have been so opaque that I've never worked up any enthusiasm to see it. Even in that limited form, there just doesn't seem to be any life there.
One copy-editing quibble (and feel free to edit this out of my comment once you correct it if you have that capability) -- the Bong Joon-ho film from 2019 is Parasite, not Paradise. Damn you, Autocorrect!!
The unearned patina of American Beauty pervades his whole filmography. He can thank Hall and Thomas Newman’s enormous contributions for his entire career, which so far has produced no good movies while winning seemingly every major award. 1917, his best movie, is a dumb stunt with nothing to say about war, a finely-made and bone-stupid action movie for people who think they’re too smart for action movies. It’s like he wanted to make a World War 2 movie but the wrong truckload of props showed up and he just shrugged and proceeded apace.
Skyfall is stupid and somehow good but is a James Bond movie, which are different than regular movies so it doesn’t count. All of the rest of his stuff is well-tooled crap. His mediocrity is at its most impressive in Road to Perdition, where he somehow made a bad movie out of uniformly good parts. I don’t know what the problem is with that movie, I don’t think anybody really does, but who gives a crap about it? Who gives a crap about anything he’s done? Jarhead made 100 million dollars and doesn’t even exist.
Weirdly, though, I think he’s a fantastic mainstream theater director and the Lehmann Trilogy was indescribably good.
I guess if I were going to make a case for Mendes - bracketing out his stage work, which I've never seen but I've heard a lot of it is pretty great - it would lean heavily on ROAD TO PERDITION, which doesn't get a lot of attention here. You can pick on the script for its adherence to a few gangster-flick chestnuts, but the film features a hall-of-fame cast doing stellar work, balanced by tons of Greek-tragic atmosphere and quite a few shots that are seared into my memory (I've probably only watched it once since it came out in 2002, but Mendes and Conrad Hall really outdid themselves.)
I don't love his Bond films - mostly for script rather than directorial reasons - and I can't say that I ever think about JARHEAD or REVOLUTIONARY ROAD or AWAY WE GO. I don't know that 1917 is, like, a top-tier war film or that it has anything significant to say about war, but it was a gripping experience and a super-subjective imagining of WWI in particular does seem to me like a project worth doing. (As someone who was a s%&thead college freshman at the time it was released, AMERICAN BEAUTY played a distressingly large part in my young-adult identity formation, something I'm still trying to atone for.)
Anyway, I've always wanted Mendes and Joe Wright to, at least once after their promising first 1-2 films, find collaborators who temper their ponderousness and high-concept cleverness into something great, and they never really have, and so everything's stayed in that B-minus-to-B-plus spectrum for them both.
Road to Perdition sure seems like a good movie. It definitely thinks it is. He hired the best cameraman and the greatest American actor of all time, and Tom Hanks and Jennifer Jason Leigh are in it too. The script makes sense. It has nicely-lit rain and tommy guns and old cars and fedoras, which are all good things to have in a movie. Even if it were stupid, which it isn’t, it should at least be fun or interesting. And yet, who loves it? Does anybody even care about it? Mendes whiffing on that cannot-miss movie is like a perverse demonstration of close-up magic.
I'd agree that RtP is shockingly forgettable but there's no need to pretend that it doesn't have its fans; plenty of glowing reviews on Letterboxed and out there in the world.
Fair enough, but I genuinely never hear anybody who loves movies talk about it. I don’t ever go on letterboxed so I can’t speak to that. The reviews were pretty good, but they’re usually pretty good for him. I’m sure it’s lots of people’s favorite movie, I just don’t know any of them.
I remember enjoying Road to Perdition when I saw it, but the only time I've had the urge to return to it is a bit of curiosity to see Superman as a boy. (Tyler Hoechlin, the kid, now plays a damn good Superman on the CW show.) On the other hand, I'd be happy to reread the Max Allen Collins/Richard Piers Rayner comic or its follow-ups anytime.
God, I remember falling so hard for American Beauty in college. Very odd time.
Oh, and while his Bond movies aren't bad (well, I've only managed to get through Skyfall), it's telling that they're just as empty as everything else he makes. Like, Skyfall is gorgeous and fun to watch, but it has an air of being About Something, when it absolutely isn't; just a vague nostalgia for "Britain" or something, and a lot of story beats stolen from other movies. I realize it's bizarre to criticize a Bond movie for being thematically bereft, but Mendes has the unfortunate curse of being a shallow artist who's convinced he has things to say, and that's not really something you can escape, regardless of context. (Besides, as clunky as Casino Royale could be, it at least tried to make Bond human. Skyfall is mostly just "hey, wouldn't it be nice to have a male M again?")
He’s a shallow man but doesn’t know it, which is why his genre films are pretty good but any project of his that feels like it’s going for depth is actually just kind of embarrassing and meaningless.
I kind of equate him with Adam McKay and Todd Phillips who similarly demand to be taken seriously recently, to disastrous results imo.
Ugh, Adam McKay.
"To answer this question, I rewatched all nine of his features"
oh Scott, the things you're willing to do for us.....
so, is Skyfall Mendes' only unquestionably good film, then?
I rewatched Skyfall recently and did not have as good a time as I thought I would. I think it suffers from a lot of the same issues as the rest of Craig’s Bond films--overlong, overserious--and Bardem’s character reads more like a Batman villain, to the point where his whole scheme is lifted right out of the Joker’s plot from the Dark Knight. That said, the parts that work *really* work, and I can see why people love it.
Somebody else here beat me to the Joker observation. I’m glad franchise films have moved out of the Dark Knight’s shadow, I feel like we had villains intentionally getting get caught every other week for a while there.
to be fair, I said "good film", not "great film"
I was never able to take the plastic bag scene seriously again after seeing Todd Solondz thoroughly take the piss out of it in Storytelling.
Having never seen American Beauty, my first introduction to the plastic bag nonsense was Not Another Teen Movie. When I discovered it was real, I was flabbergasted.
ROAD TO PERDITION is his standout for me - I agree that it's an overly serious take on pulpy material, but THE UNTOUCHABLES (and LAST MAN STANDING, and MULHOLLAND FALLS) already exists, so I'm happy for Mendes' Oscar-bait version of fedorah-hatted shoot-em-ups being out in the world.
If I didn't live on that bit of English coast where EMPIRE OF LIGHT is set (and was filmed), I would have no interest in it whatsoever - at least, I assume no-one's going to be firing a form of machine gun in it, which is my rule of thumb in separating the watchable from the insufferable in his oeuvre.
Now that you mention it... "Jarhead" had no urgency to it at all. Great essay, Scott!
On the one hand, I understand the praise for Skyfall, because it’s pretty entertaining, and coming off the stripped down origin story of Casino Royale and the nothing-burger of Quantum of Solace it gave franchise fans more elements of the classic Bond films they were missing.
On the other hand, Bardem’s villain is essentially a Heath Ledger Joker retread (down to the “I planned to have you incarcerate me all along!” scene), and I still can’t forgive how tasteless it is to have Berenice Marlohe’s character reveal to Bond that she’s a victim of sex trafficking in one scene and then him basically go right from hearing that to walking in on her in the shower; why even bring up the trafficking thing? Not to mention that she is then immediately murdered by Bardem in a contest with Bond apparently to decide who is the most callous male on the planet? (and yes, I recognize this plays into the established 1st-Bond-girl-to-show-up-in-film-ends-up-dead trope, but it still feels like a gross misstep to me)
I think the outstanding cinematography and cast get that one over the finish line, at least for a Bond movie, but the script is just as doofy as the other lousier entries in the Craig era.
I almost wish it had been doofier, but I’m also one of the weirdos who wants a return to the campy Bond of Moore and Brosnan.
Daniel Craig is always good, and the serious approach to his Bond made enough sense when Casino Royale came out, but he brings so much joy and mischief to things like Benoit Blanc or even hosting stupid old SNL you have to wonder what he’d have been like in Moonraker or something.
God, can you imagine? Craig should’ve just played his character from Logan Lucky, but with an impenetrable Scouse accent.