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American Beauty Review by
Gregory Avery
Rising
one morning from the miasma of the sheets on his marriage bed, we see that
Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) is alone, the other side of the bed being
conspicuously vacated. Outside, in the front yard, his wife, Carolyn (Annette
Bening), is tending her rose garden. Lester points out for us, before we have
the chance to notice, that the fact that the green on the handles of her rose
clippers and on her gardening clogs matches -- "that's no mistake." While
taking his morning shower, we are informed that the bit of autoeroticism Lester
engages in while under the water will, truly, be the high point of his day.
Breakfast will include an encounter with his teenage daughter Jane (Thora
Birch), a sullen girl who regards her parents with open contempt and makes no
pretense over the sham their family has become. Jane gives the impression that
she can hardly wait to be away from them for the day -- she seems to despise how
they've allowed themselves to become the misshapen people that they are, as if
parents should have known better. Lester seems to agree with her, in an unspoken
way. Framed photographs of the family they used to be, in days gone by, dot the
interior of the house like shrapnel. Lester
goes to his job, a dead-end position on a magazine staff where he has to feign
being cheerful and cooperative over the phone for so long that it has become
parrot-like, a verbal equivalent to Lillian Gish's character having to coax the
corners of her mouth up to form a smile in Broken Blossoms. He continues
with the same, cheerful tone when his much-younger boss calls him into his
office. The cheerfulness drops like a stone when he is handed a form and asked
to fill out a job description describing what he does at an office where he has
been working for 14 years -- the sort of playful cat-toying-with-mouse thing
that causes employees to shudder with dread over the possible impending use of
words like "attrition". Carolyn,
meanwhile, psyched up on taped self-assurance lectures, goes about her job as
realty agent. "I am going to sell this house, today!" she tells
herself, and proceeds to clean the floors and counters in her slip. As she shows
the place to various potential buyers, we notice, though, that the wallpaper in
some rooms is hideous, the stone fireplace in the main room has taken on a
rancid colour, and the kidney-shaped pool is surrounded by leaves that have not
been swept up. (It is also not "lagoon-like", as the literature
described it, one buyer points-out.) At the end of the day, after she has pulled
the blinds and started crying uncontrollably, Carolyn hits herself and berates
herself until she stops. Then,
it's home for dinner, an exhausted family ritual. Jane complains about the Peggy
Lee and Bobby Darin recordings that play in the background while they eat.
Carolyn retorts, in the same upbeat tones that she used with her realty
customers, that, when Jane starts preparing "healthful, nutritious
meals" for herself, then she can have control over what music is played
during dinner. Lester's reaction to this is to announce that he's going into the
kitchen to get some ice cream. For
the most part, American Beauty, director Sam Mendes and writer Alan
Ball's systematic satire of families floundering within middle-class suburbia,
is explosively funny, with lines and moments that are so acutely observant that
they make you laugh partly out of astonishment and partly because of they're
funny, that you wait with rising anticipation to see what is going to jar these
characters out of their orbits. It also accomplishes the feat of being rueful
yet creating characters that are, at times, intensely sympathetic. Their world
may be a little crazy, a little more surreal, but it is identifiable. It is the
kind of world which could be waiting around the corner for anyone. Lester,
with Carolyn, puts in an appearance one night at a high school game they
promised to attend to see the cheerleading routine that Jane has been slaving on
of late, and he lays eyes on another cheerleader, and Jane's friend, Angela (Mena
Suvari), and Lester, suddenly, slowly, gently, begins to gradually fall into
space. Kevin Spacey's face assumes an expression of wonderment, astonishment,
adoration, and unfettered delight as he watches this petite, nubile young girl,
with blond hair and the look of a cocotte from a Zola novel, swing her limbs as
if only for him and seeming to single his eyes out from all the others in the
crowd. The fantasy ends with an astonishing visual image -- a recurring motif in
the film -- that involves a cloud of rising, ruby red rose pedals, both
beautiful and intoxicating Of
course, we learn that Angela has already become one smart cookie: she's figured
out what she wants in life, how men can play a part in it, and how she can get
things from them. Lester, ground down and desperate, doesn't know what he's in
for. When he overhears Angela tell Jane that he would look much better if he
only built himself up more, Lester immediately retrieves the handbells from the
garage. The
other occurrence that affects the Burnham household is the arrival of their new
neighbors, the Fittses -- the father (Chris Cooper) a former Colonel in the
Marines, mother Barbara (Allison Janney, with long, straight hair and the serene
severity of a figure in an Andrew Wyeth landscape), and teenage son Ricky (Wes
Bentley). Ricky records tape after tape with his camcorder, and turns his
attention on the windows of the Burnham household by nightfall. At the same
time, Lester meets Ricky during a catered party where the two guys step out back
to share a joint, and when Carolyn discovers him, Lester suddenly experiences
the sensation of burbling out what is on his mind -- and not caring what effect
it'll have. Ricky senses what Lester needs, and between the free-weights and the
excellent pot, Lester is soon speaking his mind a lot -- and in such a way that
he starts enjoying himself for the first time in years, throwing the yokes that
have accumulated around his neck, one by one, off. Kevin
Spacey has been doing intriguing work as far back as Henry and June, in
1990, and he scored a triple-whammy in 1995 with his performances in Outbreak,
The Usual Suspects, and his unbilled appearance in Seven. And he
has alternated this with stage work, most recently as Hickey in a New York
production of The Iceman Cometh. Spacey has a great egalitarian face and
an infectious smile, like the pal you always wish you had. But he really steps
out in American Beauty. Spacey's performance is something of a revelation
-- he does some very tricky, very precise work, and moves in some pretty daring
territory, but he's sure of himself and what he's doing, and Lester Burnham's
liberation and relief, of letting-go and yet feeling finally in charge of his
life, infuses the whole film with a great, spiraling energy. (And audiences seem
to be wholeheartedly responding to it.) Bening's
Carolyn, for her part, is increasingly astonished and indignant at her husband's
behavior -- which she would be, because she's become the kind of a person who
needs everything to be "grounded" in her life in order to pull out of
herself what she expects herself to do and how she expects herself to act every
day. She may want to keep her husband emasculated and in his regular routine,
but, like Lester, Carolyn is in fact a victim of her own making. The filmmakers
know this, and Bening, who did a remarkably well-realized performance earlier
this year in In Dreams, knows this, and Carolyn becomes farcical without
ever turning into a simple harridan or a clichéd henpecker. She gets to kick
her heels up a bit, too, with none other than her rival, Buddy Kane the Real
Estate King (Peter Gallagher), who introduces her to a number of new thrills,
including, as it turns out, guns. Bening's Carolyn gets a great, wild expression
across her face as she discharges rounds at the local firing range (and gets
compliments on her firearm handling, too) which only goes towards keeping the
film's energy level high, as if the film itself were shaking its head, amazed,
at what the characters have gotten themselves into. Thora
Birch (earlier seen as the adorable daughter of Harrison Ford and Anne Archer's
characters in Patriot Games), has, as Jane, the beautiful, oval face of a
Renaissance-era maiden by Piero della Francesca, with the exception that, even
when she's out-of-doors, she still seems to be black-lit. She and Wes Bentley's
Ricky seem drawn to each other subconsciously, figures whose eyes meet across a
blasted landscape and who recognize something in each other immediately. Wes
Bentley's face is something else, with wide, squared cheekbones and forehead,
and eyebrows that seem to leap upwards in the middle as they travel over his
eyes, which are great, dark, and dephtless, reflecting the promise, the
possibility, of anything. Bentley gives a fine, sometimes heartrending
performance as we find out more and more about Ricky, and he can connect with
the audience intuitively. The filmmakers don't reveal nearly as much, or as
readily, about the Fittses as they do about the Burnhams -- and from what you
can tell, you're a little frightened about finding out too much about the
Fittses, anyway. (Chris Cooper, incidentally, has turned into an amazing actor:
he's just as convincing, here, playing Ricky's father, at turns a black-hearted
and piteous character, as he was portraying an immensely compassionate character
in Lone Star. But it's going to be Bentley who gets the Supporting-Actor
nod at the Academy fish-toss next February.) Ricky and Jane's growing
relationship in the film takes on a rapturous quality, and their scenes together
-- which are beautifully staged by Mendes, and photographed by the great
cinematographer Conrad Hall -- have such a hushed, anticipatory air that they
seem above-reproach and chaste. But
this is the story of how the molecules in an atom fly apart only to come,
speeding, right back around to crash into each other. On the one hand, the
filmmakers throw in some unexpected hooks that confound your expectation,
including a closing monologue delivered by Spacey which, combined with a flowing
montage, comes close to being ravishing. But something goes terribly wrong with
the film's ending. With Lester, Carolyn and Jane, the story is all about how
their characters make the leap into some sort of deliverance. Yet, the
resolution that's imposed upon the story's conclusion by the filmmakers doesn't
seem to fit, and you come away feeling disappointed. Carolyn ends up becomes the
woman doomed to fail; the kids become merely uncomprehending, like zombies
incapable of feeling; and Lester, whose transformation has been the most
exhilarating part of the entire movie, emerges as -- "decent", and,
from what we can see, rather boringly "decent", at that. Could
it be that we wanted the characters to go ahead and commit acts that are, in
fact, illegal? No: what we want is for them to experience some sort of enjoyment
after finally being liberated, and by withholding that, the film ends on a dour
note that is not all that far removed from specious moralizing. (And the
filmmakers are, obviously, way too intelligent to pull a move like that. Mendes
is the guy who staged the recent theatrical productions of Cabaret and The
Blue Room.) Or is it that, in how the characters, and the filmmakers, scooch
themselves into certain situations, and then suddenly back their way out of
them, the filmmakers are showing what is actually a certain lack-of-nerve? In
that case, everything that was good beforehand -- and what is good in this film
is very good, indeed -- ends up being almost completely toppled over because of,
of all things, a last-minute case of the jitters.
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