Most movies willingly yield to even minimal analysis--fall apart in your hands, into a set of easily identifiable conventions, character types, etc. Not so with director Sam Mendes' American Beauty, the story of what the suburban American dream looks like minus the veneer, the 'image' of success each of the characters is either violently reacting to or desperately trying to adopt. First there's Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey, in his best role since se7en, perhaps), a pathetic excuse for a father in his daughter Jane's (Thora Birch) eyes, and--as the brief opening establish es--even pathetic enough that she 'hires' her off-camera boyfriend to kill him. But this isn' t To Die For. Next there's Carolyn Burnham (Annette Benning), Lester's neurotic wife. She who says part of her job is to "live the image of success." So we know what pole she's at. After her there's the love-interest pair we all want to make it out alive: Jane and off-camera beau Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley), two fringe-dwellers intent on not buying into the establishment their parents represent. In addition there's Ricky's homophobic Marine-dad (Chris Cooper) and Jane's non-friend Angela (Mena Suvari) the budding model, who individually manage to supply a large part of the forward motion of American Beauty, which in turn allows the core characters to develop in a less contrived manner, as they don't have to carry everything at every moment. The key word here is strong writing, even down to the management of Lester's occasional narrative intrusions. Yes, voice-overs. For an audience well aware that Ridley Scott's cut of Bladerunner was far better without it. As if that wasn't enough, too, writer Alan Ball even goes one better, by having Lester's narration be from the grave, pace Traces of Red, Carlito's Way. Unlike those two, however, the dead (dying) narrator here isn't a gimmick, but a subtle narrative device: Lester earns our trust (becomes reliable) via telling us in advance how the story is going to go--that he dies at the end. This both provides a little dramatic impetus to things (we want to know how, why) and fosters the illusion that all his cards are on the table, which in turn suggests either that his death isn't going to be the 'real' climax of the movie or that everything else is going to be so exciting that his death will, in comparison, be anticlimactic. That there will be no mystery there. But then, surprise surprise, there is some mystery, and his death definitely is the climax, and the writing was so smooth all along--the narrative manipulation so deft--that there's no need for the kind of critical reinterpretation that, say, Arlington Road or Sixth Sense called for. Not that kind of ending, where the curtain's finally pulled all the way back and you wonder how you missed what was really going on. More the kind of ending where character and theme come together just long enough for you to feel like you're seeing deeper into something. And, as this is a movie (i.e., 'moving image') about an image-driven America, that something is of course there in the title: America. But then there's that second word, Beauty, which our camera eye Ricky Fitts doesn't see in the typical places--say, Angela Hayes, where Lester definitely does sees it--but in either the supra-mundane or in death, the second of which comes to form part of the algebra of the movie: that there's beauty in death, that beauty equals death. Which calls for a reevaluation of the title, keeping in mind that Lester's told us he's going to be dying here soon. In not so many words, that his death will be beautiful. And it is, both because it visually justifies the recurrent red-rose conceit of the movie and because his death is the final stage of his long-awakening. It's the old the-more-awake-you-are-the-more-doomed-you-are trick, except this time it's not dramatically tied into things (e.g., in a horror movie, the first person to 'realize' gets whacked, etc). And his awakening is a pleasure to watch, both because Spacey pulls it off with such comic elegance and because it sets so many things in motion that A) it seems highly unlikely that Alan Ball will be able to properly 'answer' each complication, and B) it becomes difficult to assign more importance to one thing or another, which is to say each development is very difficult to predict. That is, everything looks so random and muddled that our kneejerk cinematic expectations kick in and we instinctively pigeonhole American Beauty as one of those self-conscious movies more intent upon making us laugh at our denuded selves than upon telling a good story. But then, in the final minutes, Ball both ties everything neatly together and manages to make each development unpredictable yet, in retrospect, absolutely necessary. And it's all done without ever getting too serious--Ricky's military dad even has a Mr. Roper/Three's Company moment which, while not quite in keeping with the tone of the rest of the movie, is nevertheless in keeping with his paranoid conception of the world. In those final minutes too, during a sex scene which is the culmination of Lester's awakening, Sam Mendes quietly directs the camera at a tennis shoe--a child's shoe, Angela's--which manages to sum up Lester's plight in a way that dialogue really couldn't. Meaning that not only is American Beauty intelligently written, but it's strongly directed, which is a rare combination, allows American Beauty to become the movie that Ice Storm wanted to be, that The Myth of Fingerprints had vague inclinations towards, that American History X might have been. It's perhaps the strongest movie to come around in a few years. Five stars. Out of five. (c) 1999 Stephen Graham Jones for more like this, check out http://www.cinemuck.com
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