The falseness of the suburban ideal, the restrictive nature of middle-class social and gender roles, the redemptive power of beauty in a world gone mad: These ideas have been developed before, in art and theater, literature and film, but rarely so compellingly as in "American Beauty."
Richly structured, darkly comic and devastatingly well acted, "American Beauty" is the kind of cinema we desperately need but rarely see. It's bold and challenging; it questions easy assumptions about our place in society; it breaks down social models rather than exploiting their brightest sides.
Director Sam Mendes' thematic achievements are remarkable, but he also uses the narrative gifts of cinema to tell a riveting story, throbbing with suspense. An English stage wunderkind making his screen debut, Mendes exploits his understanding of two theatrical models, tragedy and farce, by building minor misunderstandings and revelations over time toward a potentially explosive climax. But the end result is neither an orgy of laughter nor a fountain of tears. Rather, "American Beauty" concludes with a violent but ultimately muted expression of the world's chaos, its random capacity for brutality and sublimity.
While the film offers no easy solutions, it doesn't deny hope. Recovery from our dysfunctional world will be tough, perhaps impossible, but perhaps it can begin if we realize our cosmic insignificance -- something the main character, Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) knows plenty about. Of course, he's narrating from beyond the grave, a circumstance that affords him some perspective.
Even without the distance of this cheeky, postmodern narrative technique, Lester has a pretty good idea of his worthlessness at the start. A resident of Every Suburb, USA, Lester has a demeaning advertising job, a frigid, melodramatic real estate agent wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening), and a 16-year-old daughter, Jane (Thora Birch), with whom he is incapable of the most cursory communication. The highlight of his day comes when he masturbates in the shower.
Changes are afoot, though, and repressed Lester will soon spray some WD-40 on his rusty id. On a reluctant trip to a basketball game to see Jane perform on the drill team, Lester spots her friend, Angela (Mena Suvari of "American Pie") and is immediately overcome with lust. And as a numbly dutiful husband at a party for the local real estate community, Lester smokes pot with Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley), the new kid next door who works catering jobs as a front so that his father doesn't know he's dealing drugs.
But "American Beauty" isn't "Lolita in Suburbia," nor is it "Dazed and Confused with Dad." The lechery and the marijuana are just the catalysts for Lester to reevaluate his life and reclaim his soul. He goes from a passive complainer, one who masks his disenchantment behind sarcasm and feigned indifference, to a self-confident, scorchingly funny aggressor. Spacey made the transformation from timidity to confidence in one unforgettable scene in "The Usual Suspects," and here he does it over the whole movie. He commands your attention, mixing caustic indignance with touching vulnerability.
Around Lester's story, Mendes and screenwriter Alan Ball weave a rich tapestry of supporting players -- who, like Lester, are not merely pathetic but sympathetic as well. By pulling off this difficult dichotomy, "American Beauty" one-ups its most recent predecessor in the dysfunctional-family genre, Todd Solondz's "Happiness." Solondz looked on suburbia with scorn and mockery, but "American Beauty" is far braver: Instead of taking its characters' loathsomeness to shocking extremes, it asks us to find some of ourselves in its deeply troubled, sometimes monstrous suburbanites.
Ball's insightful, imaginative script traces generational parallels while discovering friendships that cross the boundaries of age. While selling pot to his new buddy Lester, Ricky is romancing Jane, albeit strangely -- he begins by clandestinely taping her with a pocket-sized camcorder. Jane, flattered by the attention, becomes drawn to him -- and in one of many superb reversals of expectations, we see that Ricky isn't motivated by voyeurism as much as a profound appreciation for beauty. If the film has a title character, it's Jane, not Angela, but the title derives more from Ricky's serene ability to appreciate beauty in the mundane world around him.
As Jane, Birch creates a daring, original take on teenage disillusionment and sexual discovery. Ricky provides a strange but welcome release from her family's torturous role-playing, allowing Jane to prove untrue her mother's desperate admonition: "The only person you can count on is yourself."
And Bening, though overshadowed by Spacey, is pitch-perfect as Carolyn. The roles of wife, mother and dual-income provider have stripped her life of passion, and she responds by dramatizing the most minor details, creating a facade of perkiness that barely masks her desperation. Unable to handle her suddenly assertive husband, she resorts to lame self-help cassettes and has an affair with her real estate rival (Peter Gallagher) to gain confidence.
Ricky's family also is richly portrayed, and incites much of the film's subtly built conflict. His father (Chris Cooper), stuck in a 1950s worldview of himself and his family, introduces himself as "Colonel Frank Fitts, U.S. Marine Corps!" Nobody portrays paternal sternness better than Cooper, and Mendes and Ball develop the relationship between Frank and Ricky with insight and originality. While their interactions are marked by deceit and distrust, father and son also have a strange mutual respect that neither could possibly verbalize. Meanwhile, Frank's wife, played by a virtually unrecognizable Allison Janney, drifts through the house like a ghost, a silent victim of the volcanic conflict between the two men.
Those are the players -- to reveal more of their story would be a disservice. Let's just say things get very interesting very quickly as they strip away their socially constructed veneers. Much of suburban repression is sexual -- the only happy, healthy couple in the neighborhood is gay -- and Mendes presents and complicates this argument in fascinating ways. The expertly tended red roses around the Burnhams' house become a motif for the wildness behind the picket fence, and the dangerous sexual curiosity that propels the story.
It must be pointed out that "American Beauty" is a manipulative film -- key revelations are withheld for maximum dramatic impact, and the suspense builds only because Mendes keeps our perspective carefully limited. Yet the characters are so engrossingly portrayed that Mendes gets away with jacking up our emotional response. We see things from their perspective, discovering as they discover.
And the movie leaves us in a weird state of limbo, emphasizing the difficulty of finding a solution to suburban blight. Things may conclude in heartbreaking fashion, but not because the characters have shed their repressions: The human condition will always be fragile and tragic. But as Ricky knows, it's also beautiful, and as a result, "American Beauty" triumphs with bittersweet brilliance.
Grade: A
Read More
The best albums of 2014
By Noah Zeidman | December 4, 2014Across genres, it has been a pretty great year in music.
Top 10 movies of 2014
December 4, 2014This has been an excellent year for film, offering everything from gripping blockbusters to innovative personal films.
Iggy Azalea is “Reclassified”
December 4, 2014It has become common practice among music artists to repackage their albums in an effort to simultaneously boost single sales and dish out new content by slightly renaming the album or slapping “Deluxe” onto the title.
