Best Picture winners (with a few exceptions like No Country For Old Men or Moonlight) always tend to garner divisive reputations (if they aren't outright forgotten like certain films like The English Patient, Out Of Africa and Around The World In 80 Days have been) in the years since they took home that golden statue. 20 years later, Titanic still gets passionate debates on its artistic merits going while American Beauty seems to have that same effect, I'd been hearing about this Sam Mendes directorial debut for ages now and was mighty curious to see it for the first time and add my own two cents to the vibrant discussion.
Like many movies made at the tail end of the 1990's in America, American Beauty is all about the internal anguish of the middle-class that stems from them being trapped in mundane lives. Our lead is Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), a 42-year-old man who finds himself living a life full of unfulfillment and despair as he goes to work at a job he finds to be incredibly unrewarding and shares a home with an unhappy daughter, Jane Burnham (Thora Birch), who acts like Lester doesn't even exist and an emotionally distant wife, Carolyn Burnham (Annette Bening) , who is all about appearances.
A romantic infatuation with his daughter's friend Angela (Mena Suvari), gives Lester the boost of confidence he's been missing for eons as he now takes it upon himself to improve his life, he's gonna take back his existence and make every day awesome. The plot primarily, from there, follows Lester quitting his job, taking on a more assertive attitude and trying to improve his physique, but it also documents Carolyn's romantic affair with a local real estate mogul as well as the burgeoning relationship between Jane and her new next door neighbor Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley), who loves to videotape everything he see's.
When American Beauty is good, man is it ever good and most of those high points in this movie derive from absolutely bleak and dark sequences (many of them coming in the third act). Sam Mendes, as a filmmaker, seems quite comfortable handling these more unsavory and complicated depictions of everyday life, which might explain why he had more success with the underrated and sublime 2008 classic Revolutionary Road, which chronicled suburban angst completely in a desolate tone that American Beauty utilizes only sporadically. But again, when it does go for the unpropitious, it really does work. Elements like Allison Janney's brief supporting turn as the despondent mother of Ricky or Carolyn sitting distraught in a car in the rain, figuring out what to do with her life, these are the points in American Beauty where real artistic success is found simply by nature of it being so good at handling realistic depictions human anguish.
Unfortunately, a sizable percentage of the feature is not devoted to bleak ruminations on empty or confused people, instead, it devotes a good chunk of its running time to a thematically confused storyline involving Lester reclaiming his "manhood" by way a Men's Rights Activists vision of a mid-life crisis. It's all pretty uncomfortable to watch and the fact that Alan Ball's screenplay depicts this as, at worst, "quirky" behavior only heightens the discomfort and makes him not all that interesting of an individual to watch. What larger message is being conveyed by devoting an entire scene to this dude buying a sports car he's always wanted, praising himself for it and then berating his wife for being so overly preoccupied with objects? Search me.
Further scenes depicting Lester throwing stuff around and yelling at his wife and daughter just make it harder to get invested in this guy as a lead character, and while you can understandably debate on whether or not Alan Ball's script is approving or disapproving of these actions, the movie is most certainly wanting the audience to be on his side and root for him, which is hard to do when he's acting like a total creep. Worse still, the poor handling of Lester as a character isn't an anomaly in the screenplay as plenty of other individuals also find themselves being underwritten. Ricky's assorted pieces of wisdom and unorthodox traits leave much to be desired in execution, Carolyn is a terribly written stock stereotype saved only by Annette Bening's performance and the same can be said for Carolyn's daughter Jane.
American Beauty wants to convey, in its story, larger ideas about how precious life and the world is and it's sometimes successful at that, including in a bold ending that goes for both darkness and introspection. But for much of the film it's weirdly going through the motions on a narrative and character level, there's just not much depth here despite the assorted actors doing very well in their roles. I kept waiting for some extra level of dimension to be gleaned from these stock archetypes, but it never comes and that's a real shame because Alan Ball's screenplay does display real promise that isn't fully utilized, a facet of the motion picture only reinforced by the moments that do work like gangbusters. While American Beauty does have its scenes that fire on all cylinders, its more shallow nature has me thinking people should just watch the superior Revolutionary Road instead.
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