Cast:
Kevin Spacey (Lester Burnham), Annette Bening (Carolyn Burnham), Thora Birch (Jane Burnham), Wes Bentley (Ricky Fitts), Mena Suvari (Angela Hayes), Peter Gallagher (Buddy Kane), Allison Janney (Barbara Fitts), Chris Cooper (Col. Frank Fitts), Scott Bakula (Jim Olmeyer), and Sam Robards (Jim Berkley) Directed by Sam Mendes (#572 - Skyfall, #1585 - 1917, #1891 - Spectre)
Review:
"If you are doing a play or a film, you have to have a secret way in if you are directing it. Sometimes it’s big things. American Beauty, for me, was about my adolescence."
It isn't every day you get a movie with a lead presence who throws away his responsibilities to go on a quest to maybe get with a much, much younger woman. To start, the movie was written by Alan Ball, the playwright-turned TV writer on the sitcoms Grace Under Fire and Cybill. The Atlanta native, frustrated by his work on those shows, tried to get into film. One of the scripts he would write was cribbed from a play idea he had come up and discarded, with the passion and "anger and rage at my working situation" resulting in a script that Dreamworks Pictures liked. There were numerous inspirations: one was the media circus surrounding the Amy Fisher trial (in which a 17-year old severely wounded the wife of a man she had a sexual relationship when still underage that saw her nicknamed the "Long Island Lolita"), and the other was an actual experience involving a plastic bag that he followed intently for 10 minutes (of course, his Buddhist faith played an influence too, where he was once quoted talking about a notion of "the miraculous within the mundane"). As strange as it sounds, it really was a script that wound up directed by a first-time filmmaker in Sam Mendes, who at the time had just done a revival of the musical Cabaret (interestingly, Mendes had Spacey and Bening in mind from the beginning). Present for rewrites during production (such as excising particular aspects of the ending), Mendes and Ball would each win an Academy Award that yer (television viewers might recognize that afterwards, Ball wound up creating Six Feet Under and True Blood).
Hell, I suppose you could say that there is a beauty that is ironed out of people by culture, experience, or, well, conformity. Satire, psychological drama, whatever one calls the movie, it certainly is one that has managed to endure in the strange sphere of movies that some people really, really liked 25 years ago and others that, well, thought it was aging terribly by the years that went by (it most certainly is not the worst Best Picture winner when stuff like Cavalcade and Chariots of Fire exists). "Is that all there is?" isn't exactly the freshest premise, admittedly, because you could gleam that in another 1999 movie with Fight Club (which in perhaps a mirror of this film went from polarized reviews to a cult following in its 25 years of life) or even with Office Space. The times shifted fast on this film to a bizarro world where cynicism runs deep and the profound now reeks of pretentiousness. The facades that folks found funny to point at now just seem hollow in their barbs. Esteemed people of their age (insert any Administration of the past few decades) now resemble ghoulish relics. The taboos of older years are now stuff you may wish to bleach from your eyes on Twitter (or, for those with certain tastes, bookmark like a chipmunk), while others on social media seem to believe that their county and political values should be like of the old movies they watched as a youth. I think you get the idea, but I will say this much: the movie is kind of funny to me in that strange way that comes in facades and soap-opera weirdness. It narrates itself as if was Sunset Boulevard (1950), complete with strange self-importance and a worthwhile look (as shot by the famed Conrad L. Hall) of suburban facades.
I interpreted Spacey's performance as one that believe he is in on the joke of someone looking for meaning by basically reverting to a man-child. He trades one sense of totems for other totems in an amusing manner that is actually quite pathetic when you really get down to it. It isn't a role with any sense of dignity to it, but trying to re-invent oneself in the throes of balding hair and flabby nature is strangely enduring ot the now. I may not care for the man or his character, but I don't have to be to get a few chuckles at the pursuit of what one believes to be beauty. Honestly, Bening is the more interesting presence because somehow, her type-A personality facade is really, really amusing to me. It probably is represented best when one sees at her job in which she repeats the sentence "I will sell this house today" on a compulsive level that only makes the punchline (for all the facades one can put up, it all goes to shit in the face of looking closer) all the more amusing. Really, there may be a bit of the Burnhams in the people we may see every day, as that song by the Doors goes (people are strange...). Strangely, Bentley and Birch don't really have as much as impact as I thought they might have done for a movie that starts itself with the two of them for a moment that comes right back to the climax. It's just a couple of adrift youth that try to stake the waters between the ordinary and what is "interesting", and yeah, one gets it I suppose; Suvari may be played as an object, but her facade is at least obvious enough to be played to an actual conclusion. Besides, the brazen vulnerabilities that lie beneath the facade played by Cooper and Janney are far more compelling in those unspoken moments each has on screen (the latter basically seems to be as distant as a wide painting). In general, it is a movie that is shallow and yet somehow fascinating to see for the time it was made in, one in which it tries to make some sort of statement about the beauty of things that lie beneath the surface that have been left adrift in a time where people's pursuit for things and facades have only made one see the film as ridiculous rather than profound. Well-made and weirdly amusing, it is a movie that could only come from the turn of one millennium into another.
Overall, I give it 7 out of 10 stars.
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