The odds are against it, as the opening scenes wittily demonstrate. The scriptwriter, Alan Ball, and the director, Sam Mendes, give us a comedy of self-contempt starring Lester the Worm who slithers along from his house, which wife Caroline (a frenzied self-motivator who makes Martha Stewart look like an easygoing slob) keeps as pristine as the real estate she tries to unload on her queasy clientele, to the office, where an efficiency expert tells him to write a memo justifying his job since downsizing is nigh, back to his house where he picks at supper while his wife's choice of elevator music serenades him from the stereo and his daughter's cold stare silently communicates the sentiment she'll express aloud to a pal "I need a role model for a father. Not some geek ...."
But, as Kevin Spacey plays him, Lester Burnham is a geek with a difference, a Walter Mitty infused with menace. There has always been something deliberately stiff, creepily robotic, about Spacey's speech and gait. His level, precisely articulating voice hints at sarcasms being carefully crafted in the recesses of his mind while his stride, as well as his slow bums, evoke Jack Benny at his daintiest, though this is a Jack Benny trying to turn himself into Hannibal Lechter. And damn near succeeding. In our hearts, we always root for the worm to turn, but in Spacey's case the results can't be pretty.
And they aren't. They are first banal, then beautiful, finally catastrophic.
The banal aspect of Lester's rebellion deserves a capital B. Lester becomes infatuated with one of his daughter's high school girlfriends, a preening cheerleader and would-be model whose screaming insecurities are smothered under a lascivious facade. The scenes in which the smitten man spies on the girl while she's a guest in his house possess the cringing, skin-crawling comedy of Humbert Humbert's stalking of Lolita, but also something of its lyricism. Lester dreams of worshiping Angela while she floats in an extravagance of roses and Spacey's slack-jawed look of besottedness couldn't be funnier or more poignant.
But Angela isn't the only new thing in Lester Burnham's life. His new neighbors are a paranoid ex-army colonel his downtrodden wife, and their son, Ricky. The boy is both a pot-selling hipster who adroitly cons all authority figures (his battering, half-mad father certainly needs to be conned), and an almost Heideggerian mystic who caresses the mysterious splendor of everyday life with his video camera, preserving, among other images, the sight of a paper bag billowed and tumbled by the wind. For Ricky, it is a message from all-encompassing Being.
The boy becomes tutor to the man, but only in hipsterism, not mysticism. And so Lester learns to stymie the demands of wife, employers, and society at large with strategic nastiness, calculated frankness, deception, blackmail, and an almost lyric insolence. He takes bodybuilding tips from the neighborhood gay couple so that one day he can stand forth naked before Angela. Between the two of them, Ricky and Angela have introduced Lester to American beauty.
Does this vision convince? Does it make sense as an embrace of life just before death? as an efflorescence of vitality just before extinction?
In part it does. First-time director Mendes and his veteran cameraman, Conrad Hall (In Cold Blood, Cool Hand Luke) deliberately make the burbs look too bright and as sterile as a full-page spread in Good Housekeeping, and this gives Lester's yearning for romance and escape a certain visual rationale. At the same time, Hall's camera is alert to the unexpected, too-quickly-vanishing beauties of everyday life. For instance, there is a long shot of Lester and Ricky getting high in the cold, blue-lit ballroom of a hotel where Caroline is attending a realtors' convention. Suddenly the door in the back wall opens and a wedge of yellow light thrusts itself right into the dominant blueness. The intrusion of color into color is as exquisite as anything in Vermeer or Edward Hopper, other discoverers of the magic within the quotidian.
Alan Ball's script evinces a keen ear for both unconscious cruelties (mother to daughter about the latter's cheerleading performance: "You were wonderful! I watched your every move and you didn't screw up once.") and unconscious self-indictment (Angela: "If so many strange men want to make me, great! I'll be able to have a modeling career!"). In a world of such viperishness, no wonder Lester quests for The Great Good Place.
But does he indeed attain a higher consciousness, a more vivid reality? This brings up the oddest aspect of American Beauty. The best scenes by far in the movie are the ones in which the nominal hero, Lester, never appears: the courtship scenes of Ricky and Jane, beautifully enacted by Wes Bentley and Thora Birch. When these two fall in love, they really do attain a higher consciousness. Mendes and Ball drop their ironic stance when dealing with the lovers, and the very substance of Ricky's vision is the quintessence of anti-irony. While her friends are telling her that there's nothing worse in life than being ordinary, Jane is learning from Ricky the poetry of the everyday, the lyricism reposing within the banal, the startling weight of reality. And she teaches him that his vision needn't be solipsistic but can be communicated and shared.
Considering that Ricky and Lester like each other ("I think you've just become my personal hero," cracks Lester when he sees the boy tell off his boss), I kept wanting to see what would happen if Lester could tap into Ricky's way of looking at things rather than into the lad's supply of pot. Indeed, I wish Ball and Mendes had learned more from Ricky's mysticism before they trained their sights on suburbia, for they themselves don't see much beyond the bland appearances of suburban things. Instead they batter against them with the usual barrage of satirical missiles, their chief one being the image of the all-American frigid housewife-businesswoman who, of course, must commit adultery with a successful businessman because only success can turn her on. Annette Bening, one of our best actresses, has lots of emotional helium and she's wonderful pumping herself up behind the wheel of her car by singing "Don't Rain on My Parade," but Caroline, as written, is such a collection of neurotic tics, screams, and near-breakdowns that the actress ends up as a cartoon rather than a character.
This proves to be a serious flaw when Lester, forswearing his seduction of Angela, does unexpectedly achieve a moment of true transcendence as he gazes at family pictures of the happier past and discovers that his true joy comes from his memories of wife and child. This moment, the climax of the movie, half-worked for me because I could believe in Jane's reality but not in Caroline's.
Similarly caricatured is the paranoid military father who snarls rabidly homophobic remarks only to turn out to be himself a...well, I won't insult your intelligence by finishing that sentence. (Again, the script is at fault, not Chris Cooper's excellent performance.) Likewise, the colonel's wife is shown to be simply a zombie, for what else can a military man's wife become?
You can't make a masterpiece by cartooning some of your characters while insisting that the rest be taken as three-dimensional. Yet, hyped up by several booster shots of insolence, calmed down and textured by an interesting dose of mysticism, and given a rough feeling of coherence by smart dialogue, adroit direction, canny photography, and the greatest acting you'll catch on film all year, American Beauty is the best nonmasterpiece I've seen in a long, long time.