AMERICAN BEAUTY (1999) reviewed by George Wu
Rating: *** (out of 4)
Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) is in a loveless marriage, has a daughter who hates him, and is on the verge of being fired from his job. His id is reawakened however when he encounters and obsesses over Angela Hayes (Mena Suvari), a pretty blond who is also his daughter's good friend. In the mean time, his daughter, Jane (Thora Birch), meets and fall in love with the new next door neighbor, Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley), a drug dealer who videotapes everything around him. This is the setup of the much buzzed-about American Beauty, a film similar to The Ice Storm in subject but not in theme. While both sport dysfunctional families, The Ice Storm was essentially about the inability to communicate. American Beauty is about joie de vivre counteracted by the illusions with which people live.
At the very beginning of American Beauty, in voiceover, Lester tells us he is going to die. This plot device works thematically to get us to see this character in a different light -- one who may or may not make the most of his life in the time he has left. But giving this knowledge to the viewer also has a destructive side effect. The end of the film makes us focus on how Lester is going to die, which really has little to do with the rest of the movie. The filmmakers encourage this by supplying multiple alternatives (though not all are equally plausible). This sudden transition to thriller temporarily ejects the film's thematic concerns out the window.
All the characters see something that is not really the case, except for Ricky, the all-compassionate drug dealer aesthete. Ricky is not the disciplined hard worker his Neo-Nazi father, Colonel Fitts (Chris Cooper) thinks he is. A later plot twist further warps the Colonel's misinterpretation of his son. Ricky is also not the psychopath Angela thinks he is. Angela is not the perfect embodiment of fantasy that Lester thinks she is, and Angela is not the worldly teenager Jane thinks she is. Jane does not care for her mother as her mother Carolyn (Annette Bening) thinks she does. All of this of course leads to tragedy.
Unfortunately, the characters are so caricatured, it takes a good portion of the film for the all-around great cast to transcend their exaggerated natures and humanize them. Writer Alan Ball doesn't help matters by outfitting each character with heavy symbolic weight. Lester is the Anarchist, Carolyn is the Ayn Rand Capitalist, Thora is the Lost Soul, Ricky is the Artist, Angela is the Temptress, Colonel Fitts is Evil Incarnate. This is ultimately the kind of heavy-handedness that drags the movie down.
In one scene, Ricky tells Jane that what he is about to show her is the most beautiful thing he has ever filmed. A Tarkovsky would have just shown it (though not as blandly as done here). Director Sam Mendes saddles his image with the weight of the world and makes it feel trite. This most beautiful thing could have been just a naïve teenager's romanticism, but Mendes returns to it later, indicating it is what Ricky intends. Mendes is an accomplished theater director, but this is his debut film, so he might be forgiven for not following one of the most basic rules of narrative filmmaking -- show, don't tell. Mendes certainly does his share of showing, but then the characters always tell us afterwards about the significance of what we've just seen -- irrational homophobia! Materialism run rampant! This does not only place a mistrust in the viewer, but makes the film feel too self-important. The most erring instance of this "just in case you didn't get it" is the film's ending montage. It is overstated, sentimental, and wrongheaded.
American Beauty is a powerful film, but it owes its debt more to an extraordinary cast than to its flawed writing and direction.
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