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Although the summer brought several good films, and a couple excellent ones, the year until now has still been something of a disappointment. I go to an awful lot of movies (and a lot of awful movies); what helps keep me enthused is knowing that now and then one comes along to provide a genuinely transcendent experience -- something deserving, IMHO, an A+ rating. Last year there were five: The Thin Red Line, Central Station, Hilary and Jackie, The Mighty, and Shakespeare in Love. But so far in 1999, far and away the most successful boxoffice year to date, there had been only two, which succeeded on strength of sincerity and artfulness, respectively: October Sky and Lock, Stock, & Two Smoking Barrels. Well, thank Cecil B., this fall looks like it could remedy the shortfall, starting with something that is all the more amazing in being a first attempt not only for its director but its writer.
Judging from the advance marketing, American Beauty sounds like another addition to the rotting-suburbia genre that emerged when anti-establishment filmmakers started feeling their oats in the 60s. Kevin Spacey plays Lester Burnham, writer for an advertising magazine, who’s so burned out he might as well be stumbling brainlessly around in one of George Romero’s zombie flicks. His wife Carolyn (Annette Bening) is a real estate agent fixated on success -- and nothing else -- not only for its own sake, but for the quality of exquisitely upholstered furniture it affords her own home. Their daughter Jane (Thora Birch) is in even worse shape: she’s a typical teenager, blind to her considerable beauty, saving babysitting money to pay for breast augmentation, and as alienated from her parents as an Afghan goat herder. How could three people, confined in one household, get any more dangerous?
Easy, starting with the arrival of a new family next door: Colonel Fitts (Chris Cooper, who not uncoincidentally helped make October Sky so memorable), a strack Marine who can barely contain his hostile revulsion at the gay couple living on the other side of the Burnhams; his browbeaten, nearly comatose wife (always-intriguing -- even in the bit parts she seems confined to -- Allison Janney); and his brutalized son Ricky (relative newcomer Wes Bentley), who is striking both for his oddity and disarming ingenuousness. Together they make everybody else in the neighborhood look like the “Cosby” family (the TV version, not the real ones).
This Sugar Creek nightmare winds further downward as lonely, horny Lester suddenly finds a vigorous new rose-petaled fantasy life inhabited by Jane’s self-absorbed and -deluded (but righteously lovely) friend Angela (American Pie’s Mena Suvar), and becomes consumed with whipping his slack fortysomething body into more babe-friendly tautness. Inspired by Ricky’s divergent insouciance, and illegal vocation -- “I think you just became my personal hero” -- he blackmails his boss, quits his job, and sets about to reassemble the happy trappings of his youth: Pink Floyd, a 1970 Firebird, and flipping burgers. Meanwhile, Carolyn embarks on a torrid affair with her gun-loving competitor, Buddy “The Real Estate King” Kane (Peter Gallagher), and Ricky breaks down Jane’s defenses by making ostensibly voyeuristic candid videotapes of her.
All these things were known before I even walked into the theater. But what the trailers and advance print reviews didn’t convey was the unearthly magical quality American Beauty displays almost from its first frame. In an unexpectedly chilling opening narration, Lester gives away -- if we’re to take him seriously -- the film’s ending, hinting of dire consequences to come. But British stage director Sam Mendes, who was previously best known for directing Nicole Kidman in the infamous Blue Room on Broadway, and screenwriter Alan Ball (look for this movie to get them, and the entire cast, bucketloads of awards and nominations), whose past efforts have been confined to producing sitcoms (“Cybill,” and this season’s “Oh, Grow Up”), weave a lyrical, captivating, surprisingly gentle tale imparting the notion that just because life can be tragic doesn’t mean it has to be a tragedy. Every character seems about to implode or explode from interior or exterior forces, as is often the case in real life. But none of them is really bad at heart; they’ve all just forgotten what matters...except for Ricky, who in a perfectly scintillating example of his video fixation explains the film’s title.
Though rampant with themes that could easily be sensational and titillating, American Beauty maintains, with additional help from a whimsical soundtrack by Thomas Newman (whose 50-plus film credits include The Shawshank Redemption and The People vs. Larry Flynt), its childlike charm and sweetness throughout (unlike a film to which some are comparing it, Todd Solondz’s Happiness), even to its painful, rainy climax. So filled with powerful moments that it’s difficult to pin down just a few, this film goes way beyond a mere indictment of the neo-bourgeois lifestyle (whatever that means); it’s a celebration of the capacity to see beyond, and break out of, normality. As Lester observes, “It’s a great thing when you realize you still have the ability to surprise yourself.” A+
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