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American Beauty Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, Chris Cooper, Thora Birch
Director: Sam Mendes 1999 USA By John Pavlus Ah, suburbia: the latest pop-cultural mirror to reflect America's jaundiced gaze. When it comes to evaluating society, the cookie-cutter, cul-de-sac'd enclaves have become the microcosm of choice for our post-postmodern 90's. Tim Burton showcases comic surreality; Todd Solondz, perverse nihilism; David Lynch, varying combinations of the two. But thanks to them and others, there really isn't much left to see in picket-fence-land. How fitting it is, then, that in this final year of said decade, a film comes along that both revitalizes the genre and signs its epitaph in one fell swoop. Future filmmakers: think twice before using the suburban backdrop, because after "American Beauty," there probably isn't much you can add. Think your life sucks? Not as much as Lester Burnham (Spacey) thinks his does. Sure, he's got an attractive wife (Bening), a smart kid (Birch), a big house, and a good job. Of course, Carolyn is a phony who hasn't had sex with him in years, Jane is as remote and icy as Pluto, the house is a hollow plastic shell, and the advertising job is killing him inside like a creeping, malignant cancer. Oh, and he'll be dead in less than a year too. Lester's postmortem narration lays out these facts, but the novocaine smile smeared on his face for the first third of the film says it all: he just doesn't give a damn anymore. Lester would be just another corporate drone marching steadily towards oblivion, but two events combine to derail that destiny. After watching Jane cheerlead a basketball game, he meets Angela (Mena Suvari), a teenage nymphet whose charms jam a jolt of sexual adrenaline through his somnolent veins. And at an empty-headed corporate party, he meets the weird new neighbor boy Ricky (Wes Bentley), who introduces him to the perspective-liberating benefits of pot. Throw in some classic rock (which, helpfully, the soundtrack does), and soon Lester's well on his way to Tim Leary nirvana as he systematically tunes in, turns on, and drops out on a strange odyssey of self-reinvention. The wake caused by his cannonball into life's stagnant backyard pool sends the supporting characters bobbing wildly, turning them upside down and pitching them into each other in wholly unpredictable ways. The film opens with a regrettably manipulative flashforward, but rest assured: any expectations will be trounced on the way. If a character actor saw heaven, it would look like "American Beauty." It has no room for stars, only people. Roles normally relegated to the supporting tier are its pumping lifeblood, and its cast is, in a word, superlative. Kevin Spacey's famous deadpan delivery is unsheathed in turns both scathing and uproarious, as his beleaguered rat-racer mercilessly slaughters every suburban sacred cow in sight. But his gradual transformation from comatose husk to retrogressive rebel to satisfied sage is quietly stunning. It's truly an evolution we witness--like watching a bud bloom out of concrete in time-lapse--and it brings a shade of poetic, tragic beauty to Lester's foreshadowed demise. His co-stars are equally superb. Bening's Carolyn is so hopelessly imprisoned by the trappings of "success" that even the giddy abandon of firing a gun can't free her soul. Birch's Jane has been so eroded by her parents' hollowness that she vicariously clings to flirty, flaky Angela and secretly saves for a "boob job" she doesn't need. Ricky, played by mesmerizing newcomer Wes Bentley, turns his compulsive peeping-tom videography into transcendently profound observation in the film's most beautiful moment; his militaristic father, sketched brilliantly by Chris Cooper, exposes the tragic root of his abusive behavior in the film's most shattering revelation. Casts like this make one long for an Ensemble Performance Oscar to grant them the collective recognition they deserve. So what makes this dysfunctional parade any different than the scores of others? Plenty. Lesser films present the suburban environment as a wasteland of debilitating ennui and banal atrocities, peopled with characters meant to evoke revulsion and pity. They unpeel the rind of normalcy and show us what we wish weren't true, they're horrorshows, cautionary tales. "American Beauty" takes the same ingredients and elevates them, and in turn elevates us. In one of the film's most brilliant reversals, Lester, now manning a fast-food drive-thru, is forced to serve Carolyn and her new lover. A film like "Happiness" would squeeze this scene for all the queasy humiliation it was worth, but director Sam Mendes gives Lester the upper hand. Hilariously, Lester maintains righteous dignity from his minimum-wage perch, while Carolyn, flanked by her luxury leather and six-figure sugardaddy, cowers in shame. Lester isn't a loser, he's a hero. Embedded in the mundane, the titular beauty is a special kind-both comic and tragic, elegiac and triumphant. Suburbia as gateway to fulfillment and acceptance? Now that is worth a closer look. John Pavlus is a senior film major at Ithaca College. |
