FALL SNEAKS : Families Unhappy in Their Own Way : Three coming releases take vastly different looks at one of Hollywood’s favorite subjects: Americans’ domestic life.

It began simply enough. Alan Ball was living in New York, writing plays and supporting himself with a job in the art department of a Manhattan magazine. While on his lunch break one day he encountered a man on the street selling comic-book versions of the real-life soap opera known as the Amy Fisher trial, which then was underway. The made-for-TV movies about the case hadn’t yet appeared, but already it had been packaged as mass entertainment, with pained, complex people reduced to stock characters. On one cover of the double-sided comic book, an overweight and demonic Joey Buttafuoco preyed on a virginal teenager. The other cover featured Fisher as an evil “slut-from-hell” working her magic on the virtuous but weak older man.

“I thought to myself: We will never know what really happened,” Ball recalled the other day. “This thing had taken on a life of its own, but underneath the media circus real people’s lives were shattered.”

Ball began writing a play, wholly fictional, in which he hoped to explore what might have been going on underneath. Inspired as much by his own upbringing in a repressed, conservative Southern community as it was by the real-life facts reported on the news, Ball tried to probe the desires, fears and contradictions that possibly could lead ordinary people to make similar decisions to the ones made by Fisher and Buttafuoco.

That was seven years ago. The fruit of Ball’s labors premieres Wednesday, not as a play but as a movie. His “American Beauty,” having undergone numerous rewrites and permutations, is not only vastly different from Ball’s early stabs at writing it, but also from any other mainstream Hollywood film in recent memory. It daringly mixes comedy and the most stark drama in a story held aloft by wry lyricism and seriousness of purpose. Starring Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening, “American Beauty” is set in the sort of picture-perfect suburb where Beaver Cleaver once romped. But while the film’s clan might outwardly resemble the idealized families that once taught us moral lessons on TV and in film, what happens behind the closed doors and drawn curtains of the movie’s neighborhood more closely resemble hand-to-hand combat.

Such is the state of the cinematic family these days. Rarely are they portrayed as islands of domestic bliss. Duplicity and self-delusion are the norm. Movieland marriage is a fractured institution, and childhood a time of disillusionment and, in some cases, ridicule and abuse.

“American Beauty” is one of several movies this fall that look closely at American family life, but these aren’t families anyone would choose to belong to. In the DreamWorks release, Spacey plays a spiritually exhausted husband who has grown alienated from his wife (Bening) and daughter (Thora Birch). Over the course of the story, as Bening strays outside the marriage for succor and Birch dreams of escape with the odd boy next door, Spacey finds renewal. But he finds it in the most taboo of places--in sexual fantasies involving his daughter’s teenage friend (Mena Suvari).

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In another coming movie, 20th Century Fox’s “Anywhere but Here,” a daughter also wants more than anything to wrest herself free of an embarrassing parent. The movie, which was directed by Wayne Wang and will be released Oct. 22, stars Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman as an eccentric, flamboyant mother and her daughter who start a new life on the fringes of Beverly Hills. Their relationship changes over time in ways both funny and moving, with the daughter more often than not acting as the more mature of the two.

Castle Rock’s “The Story of Us,” to be released Oct. 15, stars Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer as a married couple who, after 15 years of marriage, find that the qualities that drew them together now threaten to tear them apart. They attempt a trial separation in this Rob Reiner-directed romantic comedy.

“Thank God for dysfunctional families,” said Alvin Sargent, the veteran writer who wrote “Anywhere but Here” and also adapted “Ordinary People,” one of the great 1980s dysfunctional family films, from the novel by Judith Guest. “They’re God’s gift to writers,” he said. “Emile Zola said, show me a family with a mother, father and two children and I’ll show you a whole library full of books.”

From the large number of “family” films that have come down the pike in recent years, the same could be said of movies.

For certain, the domestic unit has been fodder for drama and comedy for as long as either form has existed. But not until the mid-1950s, during the social disruptions of the postwar period, did the middle-class, nuclear family become a prime focus of American movie melodrama. The image of the family had evolved during the 1940s, according to film historian Thomas Schatz, with even optimistic movies such as “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “The Best Years of Our Lives” and “Shadow of a Doubt” relying for their impact on “the gradual erosion of our cultural confidence in the nuclear family.” After World War II, though, “the traditional image of marriage, the home and the family was undergoing more self-critical reflection,” he wrote in his book “Hollywood Genres.”

Since then, through the feminist revolution, the subsequent reevaluation of gender roles and the rise of two-income and single-parent homes, the portrayal of families in American movies has been anything but idyllic. The institution has come under much closer and sustained examination in recent years, in such films as “One True Thing,” “Pleasantville” and “He Got Game” from last year; Todd Solondz’s “Happiness” and “Welcome to the Dollhouse” from 1998 and 1996, respectively; and “The Ice Storm,” “Soul Food,” “Affliction,” “Ulee’s Gold” and “Eve’s Bayou,” all from 1997. And perhaps the absence of any significant parental presence in so many teen films is itself a comment on the state of things.

Of recent movies centering on the family, “Down in the Delta” stands out as a rarity in the way it affirms the strength and indomitability of familial love. More and more, conflict in movies arises not from outside but from within the home.

That certainly is the case in “The Story of Us.” In the movie written by Alan Zweibel and Jessie Nelson, the husband and wife played by Willis and Pfeiffer clearly are in love, or at least they once were. But after 15 years the opposites-attract-type qualities that once had seemed so endearing--Pfeiffer’s orderliness and attention to detail, Willis’ spontaneity and playfulness--threaten to tear them apart. While their children are away at camp, conflict causes the couple to reflect on the value of their lives together and come to hard decisions about their future.

The movie is Rob Reiner’s return to the romantic comedy vein he mined so well in “When Harry Met Sally . . . ,” (1989) only now the mismatched couple are middle-aged. This also is not altogether unfamiliar territory for Nelson, who was one of the writers of last winter’s “Stepmom,” a melodrama that also dealt with the difficulties of family life, although that Julia Roberts-Susan Sarandon movie was set after the husband and wife have divorced and another woman has entered the picture.

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Although the coming movies about families are very different, conflict between a responsible family member and another with a seemingly more laissez-faire attitude toward life is a part of all three. In “Story” and “Beauty,” the outwardly more stable member is the wife; in “Anywhere” it is a child, the teenage daughter played by Portman.

The movie’s writer, Sargent, has in his 33-year career written some of Hollywood’s most affecting stories about family dynamics, including “Ordinary People” (1980) and “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds” (1972). Yet the respected adapter of other people’s works who won Academy Awards for “People” and also in 1977 for “Julia,” says he never thought of dysfunctional families as his subject.

“I just write the characters as best as I can understand them,” he said, adding that a lot of original writing usually goes into adaptations. “I put them into complicated situations and hope for some fireworks. They get caught up in [trouble], and they fight to get out of it.”

Ball, however, in his first produced screenplay, set out consciously to explore the forces that roil beneath the surface of family life in “American Beauty.” Because it is challenging material, with an ending that has left preview audiences sitting in stunned silence, Ball said he never expected to get the script produced except possibly by a small independent. But Steven Spielberg of DreamWorks liked the script and supported it, said Ball, who was made a co-producer. The film was directed by celebrated theatrical director Sam Mendes, and Spielberg promised at the beginning that the film’s ending would be left untouched.

Given the depth and complexity of Ball’s vision, it is surprising that he comes to the movies with a background in TV situation comedy. But “Oh Grow Up,” the new ABC sitcom of which he is creator, head writer and executive producer, deals in a completely different way with the same sort of issues.

The two forms are not as dissimilar as they might seem, he said. “It’s still characters whose lives are based in reality, and who I think are--and this is going to sound terribly pretentious--they are basically people who are trying to make their way in a morally ambiguous world and trying to do the right thing, even when you aren’t necessarily rewarded for doing the right thing.”

The show centers on a trio of men living together in New York. “All three guys are wounded little boys in some way or another,” he said of the series, which premieres Sept. 22. “They all have back stories of why they latch onto each other and become the other’s bedrock.” The series, he said, is loosely based on a time in his own life.

“American Beauty,” too, is infused with elements of Ball’s childhood.

He grew up in the Atlanta suburb of Marietta, a conservative community where the only local landmark is a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in the shape of a giant chicken and in which, he said, “people are shut down and living in total denial,” much like several of the people in the film. “My parents did the best they could, but I had no model for intimacy,” he said. His home life, his community life, was “emotionally barren. I don’t think that’s peculiar to Marietta, but to me it was a town I had to get out of.”

In the movie, Bening plays an ambitious real estate agent stuck in a loveless marriage with Spacey. She is, in fact, approaching an emotional meltdown, just as he is, but she hides her unhappiness behind a cheery, well-polished veneer. “I knew lots of people like that,” Ball said. “They have this rigid need for everything to look good on the surface, while underneath it their lives are a mess. I grew up in that sort of environment. No one could acknowledge anything that was wrong.”

Next door to Bening and Spacey live the only well-adjusted people on the block, “the Jims,” a gay couple who drift in and out of the story. But also next door lives an ultra-macho former military man and his browbeaten wife and quietly rebellious son. The father has, shall we say, “issues” with homosexuality that eventually figure prominently, traumatically, into the story.

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Considering Ball’s childhood, no one could have predicted the way his life turned out.

“Nobody went to the theater when I was growing up because you just didn’t in Marietta,” said Ball, who looks and sounds amazingly like Spacey. “It was like living in a bubble.” He always thought he would grow up to be a school band director.

Instead, after studying theater in college, he headed to New York to write plays, then came an unhappy stint writing for the TV sitcoms “Cybill” and “Grace Under Fire.” The skills he acquired writing sitcoms helped him when he once again began working on the play that became “American Beauty,” but those were frustrating years, he said.

“The shows I was on were all about serving the star’s egos,” he said. “I had this free-floating rage. . . . It’s factory work. I had no emotional connection with what I was writing.”

He poured all his anger and frustration into his movie script. In a way, Ball said, he was undergoing the same experience of self-discovery and rekindling of passion that the Spacey character experiences in “American Beauty,” although he didn’t see the connection at the time.

“It’s best, I think, when you aren’t aware of any parallels or that kind of stuff,” he said. “Because if you are aware of it, then it’s therapy. If you’re not aware, then it’s a journey, a process of discovery.

While Ball’s personal experience and background are evident in every scene of his movie and new TV show, Sargent’s life could not seem further away from that of the protagonists in “Anywhere but Here.” Adapted from a Mona Simpson novel, this would seem to be a woman’s story through and through, yet it is so movingly told that the 72-year-old Sargent seems to fully inhabit the central characters, a mother and her teenage daughter.

It just goes to show that age and gender don’t matter, said Laurence Mark, the producer. What matters is the ability to relate to the characters and relationships.

Sargent has an unusual approach to script writing. He doesn’t begin by carefully outlining the story, mapping out character arcs and determining the precise placement of plot points. He writes down scenes as they occur to him.

“If there’s a situation that I just feel is going to be a part of the story, even if it’s the last scene of the movie, I write it,” he said. “I just know that it’s a truthful little scene, and everything has to relate to that moment.”

He mentions the first scene he wrote for “Ordinary People.” The father, played by Donald Sutherland, recalls the day of his son’s funeral when his wife, played by Mary Tyler Moore, had the presence of mind to tell him to wear a different shirt and shoes. The remembered incident takes on new importance now, as it crystallizes the realization that his wife of 21 years, whom he had viewed as strong, in fact hides her weakness behind her composure and rigidly ordered life, that she is incapable of acknowledging pain or showing compassion.

“I just glommed onto that moment in my mind and I wrote that,” Sargent said. “If you have [such a moment of truth] that’s a great help. It tells you so much about what precedes it, what comes after it.”

His screenplay for “Anywhere but Here” is studded with such moments of truth.

Mark said a number of writers had done scripts for the movie over the years, but Sargent’s, which was written first, was clearly the best. This was because, as different as they may seem from him, he understood the characters.

“Clearly Alvin knew about mothers because he had one,” the producer said. “And he doesn’t need to be Natalie’s age to feel similar things, to relate to what she is going through. . . . Everyone has, or has had, a family.”