Last month, as Hollywood studio executives and film trade papers reflected on a record-breaking summer movie season, they were all in agreement that while it had been a remarkable summer at the box-office, there was no sign of even a single front-runner for the Oscars as the year entered its ninth month.
Just two weeks later, after the world premiere of American Beauty at the Toronto International Film Festival, there was a consensus that, finally, a formidable front-runner had arrived. As it gradually peels away the facades behind which its principal characters live, this enthralling film reveals itself as a dark comedy of middle-aged crises, teenage angst, self-delusion and suburban alienation.
It is a mature, thoughtful and subversive picture that proves very funny, shockingly so at times, and above all - even though it treads on territory previously mined with acuity in films as diverse as The Graduate, Ordinary People, Blue Velvet, The War of the Roses, Happiness and Pleasantville - it is highly original. Astonishingly, this richly accomplished film is the work of a writer and a director who had never worked for the cinema before.
The pivotal character, played by Kevin Spacey, introduces himself in voiceover at the outset: "My name is Lester Burnham. This is my neighbourhood. This is my street. This is my life. I'm 42 years old. In less than a year, I'll be dead. Of course, I don't know that yet. But in a way, I'm dead already."
Lester Burnham is a deeply dissatisfied man. He is going through the motions of a now loveless marriage to a real estate agent, Carolyn (Annette Bening) who adopts a phoney perma-smile in public and throws herself into her work with hyperactive zeal to hide from her personal and professional frustrations. The time will come when Lester will confront her with the accusation that she is joyless.
Their only child, Jane (Thora Birch) has lost all interest in communicating with her parents, believing they have lost interest in her (as they so clearly have in each other), and the dinner table, where Jane sits in the centre, becomes a battleground.
Another dysfunctional family of three, the ironically named Fitts family, moves in next door: a gruff, violent martinet (Chris Copper) who has retired from the marines, his downtrodden wife (Allison Janney) who is remote from the world inside and outside her home, and their video-obsessed 18-year-son, Ricky (Wes Bentley) who secretly smokes and peddles dope and is subjected to regular urine tests by his father.
The two neighbouring offspring become intrigued with each other as Jane realises that Ricky is filming her on video from his bedroom window. Meanwhile, Lester becomes even more intrigued by her best friend, the precocious young Angela (Mena Suvari) after he sees her and Jane perform a cheerleader routine at a school basketball match. He fantasises about being alone with Angela while she sits in a bath full of red rose petals.
Lester has other things on his mind, like being threatened with the sack at the advertising magazine where he has been working for 14 years. Embittered by a life of regrets and dashed dreams, he reflects ruefully on his late teens when he had his whole life ahead of him and so much appeared possible.
In American Beauty the only people on the street who appear genuinely happy and well-adjusted are the well-off gay couple, Jim and Jim (Scott Bakula and Sam Robards), who live on the other side of the Burnham home, on Robin Hood Trail.
This is merely the outline of a superbly acted film which goes on to reveal layers of information regarding these principal characters, their personalities, preoccupations and interlinked fates. Its simmering power is heightened by the precise, measured direction of Sam Mendes, who eschews the flashy editing style preferred by all-too-many directors terrified of losing the 15-24 age audience. Sensitively orchestrating its shifting tones and moods, Mendes allows the movie and the people who populate it to breathe, and never hesitates to pause for an extra beat or two in a scene to allow it all to sink in more deeply with the viewer.
It is shot with terrific visual flair by the brilliant veteran, Conrad Hall, who is now 72 and, in collaboration with Mendes, devised three distinct shooting scenes for the movie - for the main body of the film, for the fantasy sequences and for the video footage.
American Beauty is, by any standards, a remarkable cinema debut for Mendes (34), an Englishman who is already one of the most acclaimed theatre directors on both sides of the Atlantic. Appointed artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse in London seven years ago, he has won several awards for his stage work which has included productions of Othello, The Birthday Party, The Plough and the Stars, Glengarry Glen Ross, Assassins, Company, The Glass Menagerie and recently a radical reworking of Cabaret which transferred from London to Broadway last year and won four Tony awards.
That richly imaginative, emotional and spine-tingling Broadway production of Cabaret was what persuaded Bruce Cohen and Dan Jinks, the producers of American Beauty, that Sam Mendes ought to direct the film, and encouraged Steven Spielberg to finance the film through DreamWorks.
The screenplay of American Beauty had been in gestation for more than six years before Mendes brought it to the screen. Alan Ball, a playwright and television scriptwriter, wrote it as a response to growing up in a deeply conservative Georgia town where community life was, he says, "emotionally barren" and "people were shut down and living in total denial", like the characters in American Beauty.
Just as in the movie where young Jane Burnham is itching for the day when she will be old enough to escape her family environment, Alan Ball got out of his home town and went to Florida State University where he majored in theatre. Moving to New York he worked as an art director at the magazines, Adweek and Inside PR, an experience which may well have prompted Lester Burnham's remark in the movie: "For 14 years I've been a whore for the advertising industry."
In his spare time, Ball turned playwright and had eight plays staged in New York before he moved to Hollywood and worked in television as a writer on the sitcoms, Cybill and Grace Under Fire. Apart from the experience he gained, this proved a dispiriting occupation. "It's factory work," he says. "I had no emotional connection with what I was writing. The shows I was on were all about serving the star's egos."
Nevertheless, Ball returned to television last week with a new sitcom, Oh Grow Up, about three men living together in New York - but this time with much more control, given his roles as creator, head writer and executive producer on the show. Meanwhile, the offers are pouring in for both Ball and Mendes as American Beauty goes on wider release across the US and the Oscars buzz builds.
Regarding the movie's title, Alan Ball says that it is deliberately ambiguous: "One of the movie's themes is how we have preconceived notions about things, but the truth often turns out to be something we never even considered - where you find true beauty might be in the place you least expect it."
American Beauty is scheduled for release in Ireland on January 28th