'American Beauty' shines on DVD

By Scott Hettrick

'American Beauty'

(DreamWorks, $26.99) If rookie film director Sam Mendes' "American Beauty" was the closest thing to a canvas painting on celluloid since Terrence Malick's "Days of Heaven," then DreamWorks' widescreen Awards Edition DVD of "American Beauty" provides an art-gallery-like display of the cinematic masterpiece. It also provides the equivalent of university instruction for aspiring cinematic artists.

The vivid, crisp image presented on the DVD , as well as the full widescreen film frame (that is 2.35 times wider than it is tall), should be the only way this film is ever presented. Cropping the extraordinarily composed and framed images to fit squarish TV sets is akin to putting the Mona Lisa in a frame that crops off her crossed hands resting near the bottom edge of the painting.

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Academy Award-winning Conrad Hall's cinematography, particularly the lighting, is exquisite.

Academy Award-winning Mendes, whose previous experience was limited to the stage, also deserves much of the credit for the cinematography, contributing the guidance of a seasoned professional that drew very high praise from no less than just such a venerable director, Steven Spielberg, during a 21-minute behind-the-scenes featurette.

Not only did Mendes meticulously storyboard nearly every shot (which Hall says during an extra feature on the DVD was so complete and detailed that the cards themselves could have been filmed and released as a movie by simply adding the musical score), but it was Mendes who ironically filmed what is perhaps the film's most memorable single shot. Mendes refuses, during both the one-hour supplemental storyboard presentation with Hall and the audio commentary with writer Alan Ball that runs the length of the movie, to describe how he filmed the poignant shot through a video camcorder of a trash bag swirling around in front of a garage amid blowing leaves. But he says that he went to about six different parking lots looking for just the right setting and just the right colors in the background to capture the scene exactly as written by Ball.

He also praises Hall's carefully staged close-up of Thora Birch in a cutaway during the scene that shows her mesmerized as she watches the footage, with the flickering light from the TV seen reflected in her eyes.

During the lengthy storyboard commentary, which often feels like a graduate course in movie-making, Mendes and the 75-year-old Hall, whose style is much more freewheeling and instinctive than the first-time director's, reflect on the decision-making process of many shots, dancing mostly delicately around some obvious points of disagreement. So much time, particularly at the very beginning, is spent discussing things that have nothing to do with the storyboard displayed on the screen, that it would have been much better to cut back to the video that was shot of the two men talking.

Mendes dominates both commentaries and often cuts off Hall and Ball, but he heaps praise on both partners, particular Ball, who has nothing but reciprocal compliments for the cinematic adaptation of his insightful script about a dysfunctional family.

Not nearly as much comment is made about Thomas Newman's brilliant and distinctive score, which is also most effectively presented on the DVD, in a choice of Dolby Digital 5.1 channel surround sound, DTS 5.1 surround sound or two-channel Dolby surround sound.

Glaringly missing from the DVD are the radically different opening and closing segments that were filmed but not used. Mendes discusses them in some detail.

One of two alternate openings showed the teen-agers in court being accused of the murder of Lester (Spacey), while the other showed Lester literally flying over his hometown.

The alternate ending would have shown the courtroom murder trial of the next-door neighbor and the media frenzy, among other things.

Hall and Mendes said recently that it was decided not to include the alternate openings, endings and outtakes because they thought it would detract from the film as directed and edited.

Although about half of the behind-the-scenes featurette produced as a TV promotion is composed of clips from the movie, the remaining 10 minutes or so is very entertaining and features informative and amusing comments from the cast and crew during the production of the film, the premiere and during early awards ceremonies.

The DVD also presents a component usable only on computers with DVD-ROM drives, the option to split the screen and scroll through a script in sync with the movie.

(c) 2000, Scott Hettrick. Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate.

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'American Beauty' official site

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