Alan Ball writes families who know what is wrong with them and still cannot behave better. We rate him most highly when the comedy stays close to grief; his solemn explanations are less persuasive.
Fi1m perspective
In American Beauty (1999), Annette Bening gives Carolyn's lines a tightness that makes the marital comedy uncomfortable. We laughed at Spacey's self-satisfaction, then felt chastened by how punishing she made their relationship seem. Alan Ball is good at making family unhappiness funny without letting us forget the pain. His breakthrough screenplay, directed by Sam Mendes, also shows how readily he can mistake a familiar complaint for a discovery. Bening supplies sympathy that his jokes have not always earned.
Conrad Hall's controlled images and Naomi Shohan's stifling domestic interiors make the dissatisfaction clear before the dialogue explains it. Editors Christopher Greenbury and Tariq Anwar give the performances time without making a fuss of each change from humour to unhappiness. Thomas Newman's music helps the gentler feelings come through. These collaborators make the screenplay persuasive for long stretches, though they cannot make every solemn observation worth hearing.
Ball found a better setting for that mixture of comedy and unhappiness in the television series he created, Six Feet Under (2001). The Fishers run a funeral business, so even ordinary domestic complaints sit beside grief. With fellow writers Kate Robin, Craig Wright and Nancy Oliver, he makes comedy from people who understand their problems and remain bad at handling them. Their suffering is taken seriously without making the family any less exasperating. The long examinations of unhappiness can wear us down, but this is the work we recommend most readily.
With True Blood (2008), Ball took the premise of Charlaine Harris's novels to the Louisiana town of Bon Temps and let the comedy get filthier. Vampires able to survive on bottled synthetic blood give him room for lurid, quick-footed entertainment. We recommend the first three seasons, before the plotting begins to coast. He was showrunner for the first five, so the decline cannot simply be assigned to his departure. Anna Paquin holds it together after the plotting stops making much effort.
His later film Uncle Frank (2020), which he wrote and directed, returns to family secrets. Our starting point would still be Six Feet Under. Allow for the occasional evening when the Fishers exhaust your patience.
Biography
Alan Ball is an American screenwriter, director and producer for film and television. He is best known for writing the screenplay for American Beauty (1999), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, and for creating the HBO series Six Feet Under (2001–2005), on which he also served as writer, director and executive producer.
Ball began his career as a playwright before writing for the sitcoms Grace Under Fire and Cybill. He later created and served as showrunner for the HBO series True Blood (2008–2014) for its first five seasons. His other directing and writing credits include the films Towelhead (2007) and Uncle Frank (2020). He has received an Emmy Award and multiple Writers Guild, Directors Guild and Producers Guild awards.
