Script: Alan Ball
Director: Sam Mendes
Produced by: Bruce Cohen, Dan Jinks
Dreamworks SKG, 1999
Learning to see beauty
When I was about sixteen, I suddenly stopped and looked at the world around me with new eyes. It was so beautiful! The green grass, the clouds in the sky, the shiny red pipes twisting up a brick wall - how could I have failed to have realized its beauty?
Maybe that's why American Beauty hit me the way it did. In it, two troubled teenagers live through the same realization, finding love in the process. It was my own experience captured on screen. So maybe I was too susceptible to be an objective judge, but I really, really liked this film. So did the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. American Beauty won five Oscars: best picture, best original screenplay, best director, best actor (Kevin Spacey), and best cinematography (by Conrad Hall). In addition, it was nominated for actress (Annette Bening), film editing (Tariq Anwar), and original music score (Thomas Newman).
And yet there are many people who fail to see the big deal about the movie, in fact, quite a few take a great dislike to it. It's easy to see why. American Beauty is full of disagreable people doing stupid, selfish things. It contains oodles of drugs, sex, and gays.
It's definitely not a film I would show my grandmother, or my seven-year-old niece for that matter. But a movie doesn't have to suit everyone in order to be good. Sometimes, provocation is the best means of waking people.
American Beauty deals with the stories of several people. Some of them are well developed, others are barely touched upon. But for almost every single character we meet in the movie, there is a personality, and a hidden tragedy. A great cast means that each actor becomes their character so much so that I, at least, keep pondering the characters' lives without remembering that they aren't real.
Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) is the anti-hero of this extraordinary everyday drama. As the story begins, he calmly relates that he has less than a year left to live. Not that it matters much, as he takes stock of what there is to live for: His wife and daughter both despise him, he has no friends, no satisfaction at work, no hobbies...
This all changes dramatically when Lester is hit by what might be described as an enlightening midlife crisis. Shell-shocked out of his comatose life by seeing his daughter's beautiful friend, he starts exercising and smoking dope, he quits his job and buys a sports car, and most shocking of all: He answers his wife back when she tries to henpeck him.
As Lester jumps from one stupid act to another, the audience can't help but rejoice at his newfound happiness. But does he turn into a better person? From griping about his personal misfortunes he at least begins to do something about them, although he still seems to take much more interest in himself than in his family. Yet we do see him trying, now and then, to change the long-standing habits of hostility in his household. And towards the end of his life, he offers compassion to two wounded, insecur people.
Apart from Lester, neighbor Frank Fitts (Chris Cooper) and his son Ricky (Wes Bentley) are the other important male characters. The two are total opposites, and rank with paradoxes: Frank, a colonel of the US Marine Corps is an angry, violent man, torn between extreme militaristic machismo and deep homosexual desires, while Ricky, a former mental patient, is solidly grounded in his own self and his sense of beauty.
The women in this saga seem to represent different pressures put on American women, and various responses to this. Barbara Fitts (Allison Janey) and Carolyn Burnham (Annette Bening) are both extremely unhappy women, and they both react in different, introvert ways. Mrs. Fitts turns into herself so much so that she's hardly part of the normal world anymore. The inwardly seething Mrs. Burnham goes out of her way to create a successful life for herself and her family.
The younger generation is represented by Jane Burnham (Thora Birch) and Angela Hayes (Mena Suvari) - only sixteen, yet believing they should be picture perfect and sexually experienced as well as constantly happy. Towards the end of the story, their perceptions seem to have changed for the better - with a little help from the stronger sex. If I had criticized this movie from a feminist perspective, I could have argued that the females are much too passive in this whole story. Despite Jane's determinedness in getting together with Ricky, they seem incapable of making any real change. But I won't do that, because even a movie about something as elusive as American Beauty needs a focal point, the focus in this case being Lester.
beauty
This is a movie of exaggeration. Each character in it is slightly too neurotic to be true. More realism would have killed the movie - the sorrows would have remained concealed, the way they normally are. By taking everything one step further, American Beauty goes beyond the bleak suburban landscape it tries to portray, and instead becomes an uplifting movie about hope.
What is American Beauty, then? Throughout the movie I kept looking for it. Is it that gorgeous cheerleader? Is it a spotless window? Is it a plastic bag, blowing in the wind? Is it a rose petal? If there is a clear moral to this movie, which I'm not so sure there need be, it could be to look for beauty in your own life. If there isn't any, you might as well be dead already.