AMERICAN BEAUTY
Reviewed by Harvey Karten DreamWorks Pictures Director: Sam Mendes Writer: Alan Ball Cast: Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, Thora Birch, Wes Bentley, Mena Suvari, Peter Gallagher, Allison Janney, Chris Cooper, Scott Bakula, Sam Robards
Leo Tolstoy told us that happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. While 90% of us get married, confident that we will be in the former category, statistics prove otherwise. What's unfortunate in that regard is advantageous for art, though. Is "The Brady Bunch" among the world's great contributions? Hardly. Look for dramatic excitement to "Agamemnon," "Medea," "Oedipus," and Hamlet, to cite a few examples. Dysfunctional families make for maximum enjoyment. But you don't have to kill your husband, your children, your uncle, or your father to deliver an interesting story. Sam Mendes proves this by adapting Alan Ball's alternately funny and poignant story, "American Beauty," to the big screen. Already named by some critics as one of the two Oscar contenders (Tom Hanks's vehicle, "The Green Mile," being the other), "American Beauty" mesmerizes because every moment, however caricatured, hits a nerve in each of us. Don't tell others who have seen this film that you cannot identify with any of the characters. You're likely to get the fortune-cookie reply, "You ought to get out more often."
We'd like to tell our bosses where to shove their jobs, our spouses where to hurl their demands, our parents where to fling their uptight, middle-class values. In "American Beauty," repressions, anxieties, and hostilities are played out in a suburban neighborhood, but urban landscapes are no strangers to dysfunction. Among well-mown lawns and newly-painted picket fences, though, more pressure is put upon residents to fit in, to appear successful, to have happy marriages, to get with the program. And so suburbanites have been reproached--justifiably or not--for having less tolerance for differences than city people. This notion makes the generic American suburb the consummate setting for "American Beauty," an ideal backdrop for its chiefly sorrowful society which--through nominally tidy lawns and lives and spirits-sodden socials try to imprint their triumphs on their acquaintances.
Foremost among them, Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) works in a cubicle as a media writer, but has utter contempt for the hollow mission of his organization and disdain for the company higher-ups and for the people he contacts each day. Nor is his home life the escape-hatch so promoted by the psychological pap that passes for profound professional literature. His wife Carolyn (Annette Bening), an every-hair- in-place real-estate agent, is frustrated to the point of tears because of her inability to sell houses. Her envy of the flourishing "king of real estate," Buddy Kane (Peter Gallagher), will prompt her to suck up to this alpha male in more than a figurative manner.
Her parents' disappointments are easily perceived by their teen-aged daughter, Jane (Thora Birch), whose best friend Angela (Mena Suvari) considers Jane's father a freak but whose secret admirer Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley) is so without cynicism that he sees beauty in everything. Though physically and psychologically abused at home by his ex- Marine father, Col. Fitts (Chris Cooper), Ricky is so enthralled by the world's resplendence that he carefully photographs all that he considers divine--people, swirling leaves and papers, even a dead bird, amassing a library of videotapes whose subject could well be American Beauty.
While director Sam Mendes ponders the town's relationships--the colonel with his son and his clinically depressed wife Barbara (Allison Janney); the daughter with her parents, her sexy best friend Angela, and her boy friend Ricky; Carolyn with her husband and her new lover, Buddy-- the focal point is Lester Burnham's connection with himself. And what an awesome job Mendes does with this fellow! Carefully and humorously developing Lester's cynicism, disappointments, and flat-out numbness, Mendes shows what happens when at the age of 42 Lester awakens from his extended coma, laying his eyes on the seductive teen cheerleader, Angela. Lester's rush recalls Dr. Bill Maplewood's attraction to the 11-year-old Billy in Todd Solondz's "Happiness" and Humbert Humbert's for Lolita in the Nabokov novel, brought back to cinematic life last year by Adrian Lyne. With Angela as catalyst for change, Lester determines to shuck off his paunch by working out until he develops awesome abs, to express himself in the most intemperate ways to his boss, his wife and his daughter, and to try at his stage of mid-life to restore the joy and laughter and abandon he experienced in his youth. His resolve, while admirable in some ways, is financially irresponsible and psychologically is little more than important rage. But what is more trenchant is that he is too late. Henri Etienne was on the money when he said in 1594 "Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait," or, "If youth but knew, if age but could."
Thrilling acting by Kevin Spacey, one of America's greatest performers, should assure him an Oscar nomination. Unfairly edged out the Tony award competition for his dazzling performance as Hickey in Broadway's "The Iceman Cometh," Spacey sets a new standard here by his facility in switching gears, in turning from a narrator who is alternately side-splitting, self-deprecatory, seething, sexy, and sensitive. Annette Bening in the less-developed and implausibly over- the-top role is a suitable butt for Spacey's rage, Chris Cooper as the stereotypical former Marine who cannot get used to the "ex" in his title, and Wes Bentley as the half-freaky, half- responsive connoisseur of American beauty are all on target. Yet Spacey carries the show. "It's just stuff and it's become more important to you than life," he protests to his materialistic wife, who is more concerned about spilling a drink on the $4000 sofa than showing physical affection for her husband. Lest we get carried away by his newly-found contempt for money, we must realize how much he grooves on the old Pontiac Firebird he has just acquired and how important Ricky's $40,000 is if he is going to continue finding life as beautiful as he has felt it to be in the past.
Most of the world's people do not live in capacious suburban homes with picket fences for decoration and Golden Retrievers to greet them when they get home. Two- thirds of humanity live in the tar-paper shacks, wooden shanties, and the like. Should we dismiss the woes of the comfortably situated as mere bourgeois inconveniences that can be solved by a few affordable sessions on the couch? Of course not. I've read of privileged, attractive and talented high-school students who shoot up their classmates and stockbrokers who kill their wives. I've seen dirt-poor, unclad kids in southern India playing on the beaches, sporting broad, authentic smiles that I see less often on the faces of American children. The Greek tragedians, in fact, seemed to believe that only the rich and powerful could truly suffer. I challenge you to see "American Beauty" without feeling great compassion for the anguish of its well-situated people, whose laughter and good times do not always erase their anguish and distress. The performances led by Kevin Spacey, the capable direction by Sam Mendes backed up by Conrad Hall's eye behind the camera, and Thomas Newman's pulsating soundtrack, all position the film for a flurry of year- end awards. I'd be hard-put to recall another movie (certainly not Ang Lee's detached and clinical "The Ice Storm") that has so skillfully integrated exuberant humor with heartbreaking pathos.
Rated R. Running Time: 118 minutes. (C) 1999 Harvey Karten
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