fri 29/03/2024

Sam Mendes back on the (American) road | reviews, news & interviews

Sam Mendes back on the (American) road

Sam Mendes back on the (American) road

Away We Go is further proof of Mendes' Americanisation

Away We Go is the name of Sam Mendes's fifth film, released in Britain this week. But the title could also serve as the buccaneering mantra of a Cambridge-educated Englishman whose career continues to shed any whiff of his home country. On stage or screen, the director is continually drawn to stories culled from across the Atlantic, where he now lives. And why not? If you had directed a first film called American Beauty that would lead to five Oscars and America eating out of your hand, you, too, might well return for more. Mendes's output isn't merely a reflection of his taste, although that part of it is important, too; it's common sense.
What difference does an artist's provenance make, one could ask, in a global culture that finds, say, the playwright Tony Kushner writing about Afghanistan (Homebody/Kabul) or Michael Winterbottom directing a film (In This World in 2003) told largely in Pashtu and Farsi?

Nonetheless, it is unusual to find a British filmmaker staking so determined a celluloid claim on a country that, in this case, the Reading-born Mendes didn't even visit in any major way until he was 27, when he first went to New York to see an actress-friend on Broadway. (A previous teaching gig in Tampa, Florida, had apparently left comparatively little impression.) Unusual unless, of course, you place Mendes's five films to date in the context of a theatre career that has often shone most brightly when the work at hand has spoken with an American accent. Not for nothing was Mendes's tenure at the Donmar in large part defined by his work on Mamet, Williams, and, pre-eminently, Stephen Sondheim. Or am I the only one who watched Away We Go and was put in mind of the Sondheim/George Furth musical, Company - which Mendes directed to deserved acclaim at the Donmar in 1995?

You'll recall that in Company a confirmed Manhattan bachelor called Bobby on the eve of his 35th birthday finds himself doing the rounds of his married friends only to end up centre-stage, alone, bloodied by the nuptial dynamics he has witnessed though by no means unbowed. And so it is in Away We Go that a young couple  who, intriguingly, are very much unmarried set off across America (with a detour north to Montreal) on a journey to relatives and friends who crop up via the sort of hyperactive cameo turns one finds in Sondheim's show: their roster in this movie includes Maggie Gyllenhaal, Chris Messina, Jeff Daniels, and American Beauty alumna, Alison Janney.

The itinerant Verona (Maya Rudolph) is pregnant, so she and her soft-spoken, thoroughly devoted boyfriend Burt (John Krasinski) hit the road in order to get a sense of various possible social environments and physical locales in which to raise a family before deciding that they are, as it happens, best off by themselves, alone. The rest of the world can go the way of Bobby's putative chums in a narrative that throws its protagonists back on themselves, just as Bobby surveys his mates only to discover that any longer-lasting, more truthful answer to his concerns and anxieties must come from within.

The American road is a leitmotif in Mendes's films, two of which fold that very word into their titles: Road To Perdition and last year's Revolutionary Road. And you, too, might feel a similarly far-reaching artistic impulse if you had made your career working within the confines of a 251-seat Covent Garden playhouse. What's fascinating, though, is the extent to which Mendes's theatre work at the Donmar and elsewhere seems to bounce off his screen CV and back again.

I vividly remember an early showing of American Beauty for Donmar folk who chuckled affectionately at a particular two-shot of Kevin Spacey and Wes Bentley that looked as if it had been positioned against the backdrop of the Donmar's defining brick back wall. (Similar framing devices recur in Away We Go.) Even Jarhead, the Gulf War drama that stylistically remains Mendes's most adventurous film so far, expands thematically on issues raised by the Nick Whitby wartime drama, To the Green Fields Beyond, that Mendes premiered at the Donmar in 2000. The difference lies in the space and freedom allowed by the cinema, whose reach extends as far as that plastic bag famously carried aloft at the close of American Beauty.

Revolutionary Road, meanwhile, plays like a more sour, extended version of some of the great family-in-crisis American mainstays that Mendes knows from the stage: The Glass Menagerie and Gypsy, among others. If only that recent film possessed either the poetry of Williams or the wit of Jule Styne, Arthur Laurents, and Sondheim, instead of which Revolutionary Road comes across as an extended acting exercise for its two Hollywood stars - which is just one of the reasons why Krasinski and Rudolph, two comparative unknowns, seem like such a refreshing alternative in a movie released less than a year after its Oscar bait predecessor. Some may find the indie vibe feel of Away We Go too premeditated by half, but I warmed to it in much the same way that Mendes's Donmar Menagerie seemed a deliberate return to his roots after directing Oliver! at the Palladium for Cameron Mackintosh the year before.

Mendes clearly isn't the first British director to make evident a passion for America that I recall Richard Eyre once explaining to me around the time that he decided to revive at the National his own revival of one of the greatest of all American musicals, Guys and Dolls: So much British fare, Eyre explained, seemed "etiolated" (his word) next to the vibrancy of the American canon that Eyre continues to examine in between such quintessentially English output as Mary Poppins (theatre) and Notes On A Scandal (film). Stephen Daldry had an early National Theatre success with a slice of American theatrical esoterica called Machinal.

But whereas Daldry then hit the big time with Billy Elliot on stage and screen - and you can hardly get more English than that - Mendes mines America in multiple ways, not least in bringing American actors to the Bard onstage via his well-established Bridge Project, which draws on both countries to make up an acting ensemble that allows Mendes to continue to live in New York with Kate Winslet and their young son, Joe. That decision brings with it a risk: one prominent American critic compared the director to "a literary tourist from Britain who has missed the point every time he has crossed the Atlantic". But as an American abroad myself, I recognise and respond to Mendes's ongoing impulse to acknowledge the otherness of the place. His cultural quest - which is to say, the road he's on - one imagines is far from finished.




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