New on DVD

A great place to raise your kids, or purgatory on Earth? These movies make the case both for and against the suburban life

By Don Kaye
Special to MSN Movies

Get tickets, showtimes and more at MSN Movies

Ah, the suburbs. The place where you can own your own home, complete with that fabled lawn and white picket fence. Where the air is filled every weekend with the sounds of children playing and dogs barking, the delicious smell of barbecuing meat wafting out of spacious backyards as sprinklers lazily water those always-green lawns. Where you know your neighbors, they know you, your kids can play safely outside and sometimes you don't even lock your door.

Sounds perfect, right? Well, underneath all that dreamy imagery lie darker truths. The 'burbs have long been accused of fostering conformity, repression, prejudice and racism. Those same new neighbors who show up with a cake on your doorstep are just as likely to spread vicious rumors about you. That nice man at the end of the block could well be a pedophile, a junkie or a mobster in hiding. Those seemingly perfect families living in those cookie-cutter houses could be masking dysfunctions that make the Addams Family look like the Waltons.

As we see in the new "Revolutionary Road," based on Richard Yates' classic novel and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as the trapped couple, the 'burbs can breed despair and tragedy, a theme that has repeated itself many times in films, from 1957's melodramatic "Peyton Place" to more recent depression-fests, like "Little Children." Yet while a plethora of movies have taken aim at the suburbs' faults -- often with deadly accuracy -- other filmmakers have found reason to celebrate those little enclaves of "normality" that sprout up outside our big, bad urban centers. It was harder to find movies about "suburban heaven" than it was to locate flicks about "suburban hell," but we did our best. And if you don't agree with our choices, feel free to talk about it behind our backs.

HELL

"American Beauty" (1999)
"Revolutionary Road" director Sam Mendes' filmmaking debut is, despite its flaws, the definitive modern depiction of suburban malaise. Kevin Spacey is the unhappy corporate drone who simply stops caring about his job, money and status -- and finds himself happier than he's ever been. Meanwhile, his shallow wife (Annette Bening) is having a desperate affair, their daughter is chronically depressed and the next-door neighbors have their own, um, issues. Yes, the characters in "American Beauty" are less real people and more stock figures, but Oscar winner Spacey in particular adds sensitivity and wit to what could have been an endurance test for the viewer.

"Edward Scissorhands" (1990)
Poor Edward, the creation of a kindly, Frankenstein-like scientist (Vincent Price), is the ultimate outsider -- welcomed into a little town for the many things he can do with the metal blades he has for hands, but immediately cast out when falsely accused of a crime. You can feel the autobiographical angst coming from director Tim Burton, whose Edward stands in for every kid who felt himself alienated in his conformist community. And what a community: the rows of boxy, identical pastel-colored houses and the loopy, repressive inhabitants within are almost more nightmarish than Burton's Gotham City in "Batman" and London in "Sweeney Todd."

"Far From Heaven" (2002)
Explicitly channeling the 1950s melodramas of director Douglas Sirk, Todd Haynes crafts a gorgeous homage to those films' operatic flourishes and subversive subtexts. Everything is right in housewife Cathy Whitaker's (Julianne Moore) life -- except that her husband (Dennis Quaid) is gay, she is attracted to her black gardener (Dennis Haysbert) and her so-called best friends are out to destroy her. The imprisoning hypocrisy of middle class life is examined with genuine feeling, even if Haynes veers a little toward camp now and then. With "wide stance" men's room encounters an issue these days, "Far From Heaven" feels real despite its shimmering surface.

"The Ice Storm" (1997)
The ambivalence and narcissism of the '70s is captured in Ang Lee's bleak and often powerful adaptation of this Rick Moody novel. The times may be different from today -- people cared about little things like Watergate back then -- but the sense of emptiness is the same among the affluent couples and their children living in a Connecticut enclave. They try to find excitement in the most '70s way possible -- a game of wife-swapping -- but the heartbreaking consequences remain the same for these directionless souls.

"Happiness" (1998)
Sandwiched between 1997's "The Ice Storm" and '99's "American Beauty," Todd Solondz's "Happiness" is perhaps the darkest of the three. Already hinting at his suburban horror show with his 1995 debut, "Welcome to the Dollhouse," Solondz took it a step further here, chronicling the lives of three sisters, their families and others who interact with them in their depressing, dehumanizing small town. Most unsettling and memorable is Dylan Baker's pedophile psychiatrist, whose discussion of his desires with his own son is almost unwatchably disturbing. That Solondz occasionally makes us laugh at all this is even more jarring.

Next page: Suburbia as Heaven