Get your own Free Home Page
Directed by Sam Mendes
Starring Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, Thora Birch, Wes Bentley,
Mena Suvari, Chris Cooper, Peter Gallagher
USA, 1999
Rated R (sexuality, drug use, violence, language)
Major elements of this film have been revealed in this review. You have been warned.
UGLINESS BEAUTIFULLY PORTRAYED
Suburbia is swarming with shallow people disguising their unhappiness with a Brady Bunch facade. So several movies of this decade have told us. Do we need to be told again? American Beauty, the first genuinely appealing and great film I’ve seen this year, repeats this famous and popular ridicule of the superficial American dream. Sam Mendes, a first-time film director just off of directing the Broadway revival of Cabaret, uses so many interesting film techniques here that it makes him seem like a pro and makes the movie feel so much fresher than its infinitely used theme. Throw in a radiating cast, a bouncy and dramatic Thomas Newman score, a very good Alan Ball screenplay, and Conrad Hall and you get a film that is noirish and funny, mainstream and atypical, and cruel and moving.
In voice-over right out of Sunset Boulevard, Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), a middle-aged writer for a media magazine, informs us that within a year he will be dead. He goes on to tell us oh so nonchalantly about his gratuitous sexual habits (which are the highlight of his day), his pathetic, crumbling family, and his routine life. His tone is flat with hints of cynicism but he quickly becomes a captivating hero.
His wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening), is a flailing, clueless Realtor whose life revolves around matching the color of her garden sheers with her shoes. She hates him. Lester’s daughter, Jane (Thora Birch), is confused, dark, but relatively innocent. She hates him. On the surface, all looks well. Their nice suburban house has a red door. The couple act lively at real estate conventions. There are smiles plastered on their faces. And they’re still married. Why, they must be happy! We know, of course, that American Beauty is going to plunge us into a world of hope-dissolving inner demons and what lies behind the pretty red door of the Burnham house.
Salvaging Lester from his hum-drum, joyless lifestyle is Angela (Mena Suvari), his daughter’s friend. Carolyn drags him out to a basketball game at their daughter’s high school to show support. Lester reluctantly goes and is awakened by the sheer beauty of Angela performing a cheer-leading act. He begins to fantasize about her and acts awkwardly in her presence. Are these feeling right? Probably not, but Lester feels strong lust towards this girl and she, being a self-proclaimed sex fanatic, announces to Jane that she wouldn’t mind having sex with him. After eavesdropping and hearing this, Lester begins to work out. He shows the symptoms of a major mid-life crisis: smoking marijuana, getting fired from his mundane job, working at a fast-food restaurant, and having dreams about this sexy teenage girl.
A mysterious family moves next door to the Burnhams. On first impression, the seemingly alienated son, Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley), seems the craziest of the pack. As the movie investigates this new family deeper, we meet a homophobic, neo-Nazi ex-Marine (Chris Cooper) who is the father of strange Ricky, and a mental case of a mother (Allison Janney) who is detached from reality. Ricky may seem the most insane of this strange group but he is the character in American Beauty who sees life through the clearest lens.
Ricky has sensitive, hippie attitudes and has the somewhat demented habit of filming everything. He explains this by claiming everything is beautiful (how’s that for banal?) His filming teeters on voyeurism when he starts taping Jane’s every move. He tells her confidently that he finds her fascinating. He is without any inhibitions, which is the attitude American Beauty promotes as the true way of life. Going against her friend, Angela, Jane soon becomes drawn to this enigmatic eighteen-year-old. Despite the fact that he sells pounds of drugs to Lester, who is becoming more unrealistic than ever, and the fact that his father violently beats him and that he hops from job to job just to cloak his drug-selling habit until he can go off on his own, Ricky is at the heart of American Beauty’s message.
Meanwhile, Carolyn begins an affair with the leading Realtor in the business, The King (Peter Gallagher). She also begins the hobby of shooting guns. The passion in Lester and Carolyn’s marriage ran out long ago, but this is the first time the partners have actually done something to satisfy themselves. Carolyn starts chanting self-help mantras she pulls from The King’s business theories ("To achieve success, one must project an image of success") and tapes she plays in her car ("I refuse to be the victim.")
American Beauty borders on the style of an outrageous, campy comic strip and an intense, emotional portrait of suburban citizens. At first, the film looks to be only a sick, albeit engrossing, derision of its flat, broken caricatures. At the end, the caricatures turn into real life human beings who feel. Only Ricky and Jane are consistently human throughout the film. Ricky has discovered the meaning of life (strangely, through the image of a plastic bag dancing in the wind) while all the rest of the characters are on their journey.
Maybe American Beauty is trying to hint at the intelligence and depth and innocence of youth. The kids in this movie may be potty-mouthed (all teenagers are) but they are more sensitive than the adults. American Beauty might also be hinting that superficiality, which is a trait of nearly all the characters in the film, is not inborn but is attained in the confusion, muddle, and excess of adulthood.
American Beauty is as much about sexual confusion and frustration as it is about the superficiality of suburbia. Lester is not the only one going through a sexual ordeal; Carolyn has an affair with The King to fulfill her low self-esteem, Angela admits that she is a virgin, and Ricky’s harsh father, we discover late in the movie, is actually a homophobic homosexual. American Beauty brings out the cruel comedy of our sexual problems and sheds light on all of the dilemmas it includes.
American Beauty has been getting well-deserved accolades for its brilliant acting. The cast do an amazing job of acting out one-noted cartoon freaks, then going deeper into their characters and performing their emotional frustrations. Kevin Spacey gives a phenomenal performance as Lester. His flat, comic timing is perfection, but he is also able to display large amounts of emotion and a great ability of being both cold and sympathetic. Annette Bening’s character’s humanity is never completely realized, but she is a great actor and does amazing things with her Carolyn, a Martha Stewart-like, compulsive annoyance. Chris Cooper revisits the realms of the misunderstanding father (October Sky also featured him as a hatable bully dad) but here he is savage and beastly. Still, he is capable of showing a soft side and his character’s struggle with his sexuality. Perhaps most effective are Wes Bentley, Thora Birch, and Mena Suvari. Bentley is successful in making Ricky very weird and very heroic; Birch is better than ever (even though she often hits the wrong notes in very awry ways) with a raw quality that few young actors have shown (only Anna Paquin comes to mind as another such young star); and Mena Suvari makes Angela slutty and sexy, then later transforms her into an innocent, wild-minded child.
Conrad Hall and Mendes create a wonderful color scheme for American Beauty. There are a lot of comic strip colors and the recurring color is red, signifying the contrast between the gloomy life behind closed doors and the jubilance expressed on the surface of things. Several colors, like red and blue, are heavily exaggerated to the point where the images are bright, pristine, and frighteningly vibrant and artificial, and the suburban settings with ever-present picket fences and rose gardens are overstated wonderfully too. Hall is one of the master cinematographers. He’s up there with the likes of Sven Nykvist, Vittorio Storaro, and Haskell Wexler. Some of the imagery he uses and the way he frames his scenes is awe-striking.
American Beauty recalls the work of David Lynch, the infamous Happiness, and the very good ‘70s suburban mockery The Ice Storm. Thematically, this movie is a cliché, but its greatness lies in its delight in taking that cliché and turning it inside out with tongue-in-cheek humor and some of the most emotional scenes and cinematic situations in years. Stylistically, American Beauty reminded me of the imagery in The Graduate that resembled that of a cartoon and expressed alienation so creatively. What is so great about this film is how it makes an overplayed storyline new again. It revitalizes the "Suburban People are Empty" theme with seemingly novel approaches to scenes and a darkness that is hilarious and sardonic, but not so much that it makes you leave the theater frustrated and choking on the filmmaker’s morbidity. Its only evident flaws are its omnipresent voice-over, which has its uses at times, but occasionally gets in the way, and its tendency to brutalize its audience and put on airs.
As you probably know, American Beauty is receiving tremendously positive critical attention. Every newspaper is waving its flag, calling it a masterwork. Yet, online critics I have read have given American Beauty ‘B’ grades, calling it nothing remarkable. I went into the theater wanting to be able to dismiss it, to write a review that showed I was able to detect mediocrity even in the midst of critical hoopla. The film captivates me, though, and while I’m hesitant to name it a masterpiece, I was moved to tears in the same way flawed films like The Rose made me break down. American Beauty is a triumphant work and works like an utterly beautiful masterpiece (whether it is one or not), both on the surface and, even more importantly, beneath it.
By Andrew Chan
Get your own Free Home Page