American Beauty: Only Skin Deep by Curtis Edmonds -- blueduck@hsbr.org
Kevin Spacey, not too long ago, helped reintroduce us to the seven deadly sins in Seven. In no particular order, they are gluttony, avarice, envy, pride, wrath, lust, and the other one. (I'd look it up, but I'm too lazy.)
Aside from a hearty helping of Lust, American Beauty mostly steers clears of the deadly sins. What we see are a laundry list of tacky little suburban sins. Stalking the Cute Neighbor with a Video Camera. Trading in the Camry without Asking the Wife. Buying Marijuana from the Kid Next Door. Saying Mean-Spirited Things about the Gay Neighbors. And so forth. Even the Lust is tacky, lending itself more to Jerry Springer than the stuff of high drama.
In a way, this is appropriate, American Beauty is not truly concerned with the deadly power of sin at all. Its focus is on resentment, which is equally as destructive and deadly without being as much fun. American Beauty presents a seething, simmering cauldron of resentment, focusing on one Lester Burnham, played by the incomparable Kevin Spacey. Burnham is burnt out, sick of his cubicle and his job and his smarmy employer. His family dynamics are replete with the sort of circular resentment it takes years of therapy to overcome. It's spilling over into the real estate practice of wife Carolyn (Annette Bening) and into daughter Jane's (Thora Birch) relationship with her beautiful best friend Angela (Mena Suvari, a tempting enchantress right up until the time that she opens her mouth).
So much resentment is building at the Burnham house that it's even sloshing over to next door. One family, we're told, has already left the neighborhood because an enraged Carolyn uprooted their sycamore tree. ("The root system was on our side," she explains.) The new neighbors have their own growing resentments, and these interact with the Burnham's resentments. In fact, you'd have to be a sociopath not to be affected by this yawning ocean of resentments. American Beauty is thoughtful enough to provide us one in the person of Ricky Fitts, (Wes Bentley), the teenage neighbor next door with the video camera. Ricky is admirably self-possessed and confident, but creepy -- a young Hannibal Lecter with a camcorder.
Eventually, with all this resentment floating around, something has to give. And when you think about it, this may be a good year to let off a little resentment. Check out the Doug Hutchison character in The Green Mile and see how he unleashes his resentment against an inmate who mocked him. Take a look at George Clooney's soon-to-be-cashiered major in Three Kings, who is driven at least as much by resentment as greed. Or the extreme steps taken by John Cusack's character when he resents his wife's desire for freedom in Being John Malkovich. To go back to the earlier part of the year, there's Election and Rushmore, where Matthew Broderick and Bill Murray experience a lot of the same resentment as Spacey does here. And don't forget Fight Club, which oozes with resentment to about the same extent that it oozes with blood.
Better yet, don't go to any of these movies. Just stay at home and rent The Ref. If you haven't seen it, you're missing out on one of the funniest comedies of the 1990's. The Ref features the selfsame Kevin Spacey, playing Lester Burnham all over again. Judy Davis is his frustrated wife, and her character is a close enough duplicate of Bening's to make one wonder if Davis and Bening have ever been in the same room at the same time. In The Ref, a long-brewing cloudburst between husband and wife is precipitated by the arrival of cat burglar Denis Leary, who takes the couple hostage in the course of a botched robbery. Davis and Spacey engage in this tremendously bitter verbal duel all the way through the movie, but the resentment level is leavened considerably by a hilarious script.
Much of the comedy in The Ref comes from the aggravation that Leary (no stranger to angry resentful outbursts himself) is forced to endure in listening to the bickerings between Spacey and Davis. But in American Beauty, we, the audience, are the outsiders looking in on these resentful relationships. Unlike Leary's character, we can't tie up Spacey and Bening and yell at them to shut up, and more's the pity. While there's some comedy to be had in American Beauty, (especially one funny scene where Spacey and Bening confront each other at a fast-food joint) mostly, it's overwhelmed by the anger and the bitterness and the resentment.
As a piece of entertainment, American Beauty is just flat-out disappointing. For me, anyway, the pervasive level of repressed hostility and outright resentment seeped over into a resentment of the movie and all its works, enough so that I couldn't enjoy it at any level. The characters are neither likable or sufficiently interesting or colorful to allow them to get away with unlikability. The acting isn't good enough to recommend it, either. Although Spacey is his usual wonderful self, he never manages to differentiate Lester Burnham's character from his overall persona. Wes Bentley is spooky-good as the creepy neighbor, but his part is just so odd that it's hard to connect with him.
American Beauty has been winning a lot of the critic's awards, so there's very likely more to it than I got out of it. But it's hard to see what that might be. Maybe there's some value to the whole thing about unveiling the seedy side of suburbia, but, hey, I could've told you that suburban life is depressing, and it wouldn't have cost you $7, either. There's some pretentious talk about the idea of beauty, illustrated by this little movie of this plastic bag flying around like the feather from Forrest Gump. However, all of this claptrap comes out of the mouth of Ricky the sociopathic neighbor, who walks around filming dead birds and such. If there's higher truth or higher meaning in American Beauty, it's only skin-deep.
According to one of the real-estate signs in the neighborhood, American Beauty takes place in area code 847, which works out to be suburban Chicago. I know this, because I just looked it up, and I can tell you that I'm disappointed. Why? You see, at the beginning of the movie, Lester Burnham tells us that he's going to die. Well, he does die. And when he dies, I was comforted by the thought that maybe the death took place in suburban Baltimore, and that maybe, just maybe, Tim Bayliss and Frank Pembleton would show up at the door and investigate, and that somehow, this whole movie would turn into a Homicide episode, which would have improved it no end.
For me, at least, in moviemaking, there are only two deadly sins. One is casting Richard Gere. The other one, almost as bad, is the sin of not being entertaining. American Beauty wisely steers clear of the first one, but commits the second one over and over again. In the end, it's enough to make you resent the whole movie.
-- Curtis Edmonds blueduck@hsbr.org
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