director
Sam Mendes
screenwriter
Alan Ball
producers
Bruce Cohen
Dan Jinks
cinematographer
Conrad L. Hall
music
Thomas Newman
editors
Tariq Anwar
Chris Greenbury
cast
Kevin Spacey (Lester Burnham)
Annette Bening (Carolyn Burnham)
Thora Birch (Jane Burnham)
Wes Bentley (Ricky Fitts)
Mena Suvari (Angela Hayes)
Peter Gallagher (Buddy Kane)
Allison Janney (Barbara Fitts)
Chris Cooper (Colonel Frank Fitts)
Scott Bakula (Jim Olmeyer)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 121m
u.s.
release: 9/17/99
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official website
other sam
mendes films
reviewed on this website:
- jarhead
- road to perdition
|
Where
is the beauty in a discarded plastic bag tossed around in the
wind? That's the central image in American Beauty, a forceful
and morose drama about a suburban family cracking apart. As it
happens, there is considerable beauty in that plastic bag as
it swoops and dances; it's also a useful symbolic tool. The movie's
hero, Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), is himself something of
a plastic bag thrown around by fate, unwanted and empty. A magazine
writer stuck in a loveless marriage, Lester decides one day to
drop out of it all, and suddenly the plastic bag no longer looks
empty -- it can be filled, it now has potential.
American Beauty is narrated by Lester from beyond the
grave; he's detached and ironic as he tells us about his impending
downfall, and nobody is better at this detachment than Kevin
Spacey. It fits him perfectly -- he has always seemed like a
man who knows something you don't but is keeping it to himself,
for his own private amusement. Here, though, he adds an almost
Buddhist contentment: being detached from things that don't matter
isn't so bad, and Lester's life has not mattered in a very long
time. In death, he sees the sad comedy in everything he'd thought
so important; the irony is that he dies soon after his new contentment.
Lester's wife Carolyn (Annette Bening in a bravely unsympathetic
turn) is a driven careerist, an edgy woman determined to succeed
as a real-estate agent. She spends her days prettying up vacant
homes and showing them to disinterested clients: she, too, is
trying to see the beauty in emptiness. Their daughter Jane (Thora
Birch) is a typically disaffected teen, mortally embarrassed
by her "pathetic" parents; she hangs out with blonde
cheerleader Angela (Mena Suvari, a talent to watch), a cynical
wannabe-model who catches Lester's yearning eye. Lester becomes
obsessed with Angela, giving himself over to florid rose-petaled
fantasies of her; he devotes himself to working out and getting
high with Jane's boyfriend Ricky (Wes Bentley).
There's some satirical flavor in the sight of middle-class baby
boomers regressing to adolescence (Carolyn, for her part, has
a fling with rival real-estate hotshot Peter Gallagher and develops
a gun fetish), but American Beauty is not a satire. Thematically,
we've been on this turf before, in the tales of Raymond Carver
and in recent films like The Ice Storm
and Happiness. Yet the filmmakers
-- writer Alan Ball, first-time director Sam Mendes (who comes
from the theater) -- don't invite us to sneer at the suffering
of their characters. The movie's point isn't that suburban families
are miserable under their Brady-bunch facade; we knew that. It's
more about wanting to return to a point in life when everything
seemed possible, not realizing that everything still is possible
if only we loosen our grip on things we can't have, and learn
to appreciate the grace of everyday, mundane things.
Sound a little highfalutin? It is, a little. American Beauty
sometimes teeters on the edge of adolescent romantic jive, and
occasionally falls into it, as when Ricky shows Jane his video
footage of that plastic bag and gushes about how all the beauty
in the world hurts him. And the whodunit aspect of the climax
-- who killed Lester and why? -- feels tacked on, as if the ending
were once more ambiguous before the studio imposed a clear-cut
resolution. (I've since learned that the film did indeed have
a different ending originally.) But really, what Ricky says about
the plastic bag doesn't matter, and the identity of Lester's
assassin doesn't matter. These are just details, and despite
its flaws (and beauty without flaw, as Ricky points out, is just
ordinary), American Beauty is a small classic. Like that
plastic bag, it's an elusive and allusive work of art that won't
be pinned down easily; whether you see it as empty, and what
you choose to put into it, is up to you. |