"The movie is certainly anti-suburbs, and therefore, given that more Americans live in the suburbs than live in either town or country, it is implicitly anti-audience." Sam Mendes, director of American Beauty

For the past fifty years, suburbia as a locale and suburbanism as a way of life have continued to provide fertile grounds for Hollywood in practically every genre: melodramas, comedies, and mostly critical satires. Lagging behind reality, Hollywood is still making films about stultifying and dull 1950s conformity and the need for self-expression and sexual liberationas if nothing was achieved in the 1960s and 1970s.

Indeed, the last decade has been particularly significant in producing suburban fare, with such diverse films as "Safe" (1995), "The Ice Storm" (1977), "Happiness" and "Pleasantville" (both 1998), "American Beauty" (1999), "Far From Heaven" (2002), and now Todd Field's "Little Children."

In this article, I wish to compare between Sam Mendes' Oscar-winning "American Beauty" and Todd Field's "Little Children."

American Beauty

"American Beauty," a dark comedy about the American way of life, offers a rather incisive view of suburban angst. Set in a ttypically dysfunctional American community (Los Angeles, where else), and dealing with the here and now, "American Beauty" is both contemporary and a rehash of the past, a blend of the zeitgeist of 1950s Eisenhower and 1990s Clinton (see below).

Though British, director Mendes, in his impressive screen debut, shows instinctive understanding for American character, tone, and dialogue. First-time scripter Alan Ball (of TV's "Six Feet Under") mines familiar suburban turf for profound pathos, vibrant characters, and one-liners. Ball takes the concerns of a specific group, the upper-middle class, and turns its lifestyle into a redemptive sermon on humanity, exploring the "comforts" of living in an economic boom, while continuing to search for the true meaning of life.

Nonetheless, released a year after "Happiness," Todd Solondz's audacious expose of a dysfunctional family, and two years after Ang Lee's "The Ice Storm," "American Beauty" seemed facile in its satirical elements.

The film's protagonist Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), who works for an advertising trade magazine, comes home every night to a hollow and lifeless existence in the burbs. The high point of his day, he says (and shows us), is masturbating in the shower. "This is my neighborhood, this is my street, this is my life," says Lester passionlessly, as the camera pans from the skies on his neighborhood, street, and front door of the Burnham's house. "I'm 42 years old," continues Lester. "In less than a year, I'll be dead. Of course, I don't know that. In a way, I'm dead already."

Bright and self-aware, Lester knows enough to hate himself and to despise those around him for failing to have reached that advanced state of being. A middle-aged man, he has taken an obsessive liking of his daughter's cheerleader friend, a blonde nymphet called Angela (Mena Suvari), deluding himself that sex will liberate him from his dull and stifling existence.

Lester's wife Carolyn (Annette Bening) is a neurotic realtor obsessed with materialism and conspicuous consumption; the handle on her pruning shears matches her gardening boots. Bored, repressed, and frustrated (one night she wakes up to find her husband masturbating next to her), she begins an adulterous but open affair with a colleague (Peter Gallagher).

And the younger generation Wes Bentley plays Lester's son, a mysterious youth with hidden depths of wisdom and a hidden camera. The daughter (Thora Birch) is sullen and uncommunicative, and Angela, as Lester's object if desire, is a girl who is not as precocious as she acts. The tough-as-nails military homophobe next door turns out to be a closet homosexual. Conversely, the seemingly troubled youngster turns out to be a sensitive drug dealer spouting philosophy.

"American Beauty" has been compared to "The Graduate" (1967) by the San Jose Mercury News' critic Julie Hinds. For Hinds, it's as if Kevin Spacey was playing Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman's character), now stuck in an unhappy marriage, ready to quit his job at a plastics manufacturer.

Hinds perceives the movie as a time capsule and a work of art, depicting what it is like to be alive at a specific time in America, the tendency to ignore the beauty of what's around you and dream instead of things you can't have. Among other qualities, the film defines its title subject by a plastic garbage bag tossed in the wind, capturing the loveliness of a fleeting moment out of the ordinary.

For "Entertainment Weekly" Mark Harris, "American Beauty" is a film that has "more laughs than any other in the Best Picture category and is indisputably the grimmest as well." There are not many warm characters to root for in this amoral, nihilistic milieu. The movie is a self-conscious, stylized meditation on American life, at once highly cinematic and highly theatrical.

As noted, Mendes and Ball have taken some characters from a 1950s melodrama and placed them in the late 1990s. They seem satisfied to serve up the same formulaic suburban films Hollywood has been doing for decades. "American Beauty"'s view of American life is supposed to be sharp and acerbic, but instead it patronizes most of its characters and registers as pastiche-like compendium of clichs from other films.

Almost each character is a familiar type from previous Hollywood films. The story is narrated by Lester, who's a corpse-like William Holden in Billy Wilder's "Sunset Boulevard." Lester lusts after a nymphet-like Angela in a manner that recalls James Mason lusting after Sue Lyons in Stanely Kubrick's 1962 "Lolita," based on Nobokov's famous novel. There's a bit of "sex, lies and videotape" in the character played by Wes Bentley. The repressed homosexual military (Chris Cooper) recalls Brando's character in John Huston's 1968 "Reflections in a Golden Eye."

Little Children

As a take on American suburbia, "Little Children" also offers a darkly humorous view of a dozen of characters whose paths crisscross in comic and tragic ways. Nonetheless, in scope and ambition, his film goes beyond "American Beauty," recalling Robert Altman and Paul Thomas Anderson's large ensemble pieces.

A deeper look at "Little Children" suggests that it's a different kind of suburban movie than either "American Beauty" or "Happiness," one with a new gallery of characters, among them a pedophile trying to integrate into the community. "Little Children" is at once more ambitious and complex than "American Beauty," though it's also more problematic, perhaps because of its ambitions.

As co-written by Field and Tom Perrotta, based on the best-selling novel by Perrotta (who also wrote "Election," made into a great picture by Alexander Payne), "Little Children" centers on at least twelve fully developed characters, whose lives intersect in surprising, even dangerous ways on the playgrounds, town pool, streets, and homes of their small community. Like "American Beauty," the film is narrated, but it's a third-person, not subjective, voice-over, functioning more as an outside commentary on the story than Lester's first person ironic narration.

The text is sufficiently dense and the tone is rich enough to be interpreted in different ways by viewers. On one level, the movie is a modern-day fable that explores the turbulent emotional landscape beneath the surface of what seems to be a conventional suburban neighborhood, where residents juggle marriage and children, sexual desire and infidelity, personal and public lives. On another level, "Little Children" is an anatomy of characters embarking on personal and collective journeys as emotionally revealing as they are darkly humorous.

The film's protagonist, Todd (Patrick Wilson), is younger and more handsome than Lester. A house-husband, affectionately known to the stay-at-home moms of the neighborhood as The Prom King, Todd is every womans sexual fantasy, except for his wife Kathy (Jennifer Connelly), the family's breadwinner who's a documentarian.(There's wonderful scene in which she interviews a young boy whose father had died in Iraq).

Though not as well-developed as the other characters, Kathy is not a caricature as "American Beauty"'s Carolyn Burnham. She's a career woman and dedicated mother, who puts pressure on Todd to pursue his legal career, since he has failed not once but twice the bar examinations. The film's female protagonist, sort of Todd's counter figure, is the young, beautiful, and alert Sarah (Kate Winslet). Once a passionate feminist, aspiring to become a PhD in literature (but never wrote her dissertation), Sarah seems to be stuck in a listless, run-of-the-mill marriage to Richard.

Sarah is the only mom in the neighborhood who has the courage to introduce herself to the mysterious Prom King. Sparks fly from the very first meeting, in which Sarah asks for Todd's phone number to impress her friends and win a $5 bet. Gradually, amidst talks at the neighborhood pool and walks in the park with their kids, Todd and Sarah delve into a heated affair. Todd sees a light in Sarah her husband hasnt noticed for years, and Sarah fills the emotional void his wife Kathy has created in her pursuit of more stable upscale life, defined by materialistic possessions.

Sarahs wayward attentions dont seem to bother her husband, Richard. Hes far too obsessed with an online stripper, Slutty Kay, to even notice. Richard becomes so enamored of this Internet exhibitionist that he lets himself get caught by Sarah in an uncompromising position that would embarrass every man, let alone a married one.

The specific reactions to Todd and Sarahs infidelity cannot be described, but suffice is to say that it's steamy affair with full nudity (of both) and daring sexual positions, at least as far as bourgeois sexuality is concerned. In some introspective reading group scenes, the movie makes an inventive parallel between the tragic heroine of Flaubert's seminal novel "Madame Bovary" and Sarah's current problem.

What rallies the characters together in "Little Children" is the appearance of Ronnie (brilliantly played by Jackie Earle Halley) a convicted sex offender, who returns to the neighborhood after a stint in prison. His mother May is still convinced that her baby boy could never do such terrible things, but the rest of the community thinks otherwise. As Ronnie's attempts to lead a normal suburban life begin to falter, the neighborhood is quick to organize against him.

Both entertaining and poignant, "Little Children" provides a different perspective on suburbia, a fresher take on the thesis of Six Degrees of Separation. Unlike the theatrically stylized "American Beauty," "Little Children" is more realistic and authentic in its attention to detail, and though critical of subrubia and its denizens, it doesn't judge or pander to its characters, not even toward an easy target like the pedophile.