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| American Beauty
Description: Lester Burnham (Spacey) is a gainfully employed suburban husband and father. Fed up with his boring, stagnant existence, he quits his job and decides to reinvent himself as a pot smoking, responsibility-shirking teenager. What follows is at once cynical, hysterical, and, eventually, tragically uplifting. A flawless cast (Spacey, Bening, Birch, Suvari, Bentley, and especially Cooper) combine to deliver one of the decade's strongest ensemble performances in this multiple Oscar-winning film. Director Mendes, already a wunderkind in the world of British theatre, proves that his talent isn't limited to the stage.The tale of Lester Burnham (Spacey), a suburban father who snaps when he becomes disgusted with his stale, repetitive existence. Burnham lets us know in voice-over from the film's opening that this is the day he dies (using the SUNSET BOULEVARD flashback approach), a technique that adds an inevitable tension to the proceedings, and keeps the story moving forward at all times
Year: 1999
Classification: Drama/Comedy
Directed:
- Sam Mendes
Actors/Actresses:
- Annette Bening as Carolyn Burnham
- Thora Birch as Jane Burnham
- Scott Bakula as Jim Olmeyer
- Chris Cooper as Frank Fitts
- Allison Janney as Barbara Fitts
- Kevin Spacey as Lester Burnham
- Mena Suvari as Angela Hayes
- Wes Bentley as Ricky Fitts
- Peter Gallagher as Buddy Kane
- Sam Robards as Jim Berkley
- Barry Del Sherman as Brad Dupree
misunderstood
I'd like to address some of the criticisms made in earlier reviews about this film and offer my interpretation. The main criticism seems to be twofold: firstly, the film uses cliched characters rather than realistic portraits, secondly, the film offers a simplistic message about breaking out of mundane everyday life.
To begin with, yes the film does use cliches. It's deliberate. At no time does American Beauty claim to be a realistic portrayal of suburban life. It uses extremes and saturated emotions, as well as saturated colours in the cinematography, to offer an incisive, sarcastic, and over the top criticism of Western Culture. (Althought the film is set in suburban America I think it could have been set in the affluent suburbs of many Western nations and still have been apt.) The characters are consciously and obviously stereotyped - the middle aged man in the throws of a mid life crisis, the shallow and ambitious real estate agent, the beautiful cheerleader, the latently homosexual marine - but we are encouraged to recognise these as stereotypes and to focus on the way in which these figures struggle with the details, desires, and fears of their world. It is a hypereality that is being presented, and is which is used to mock and criticise the actual.
Some have seen the film as little more than a saccharine message about being true to yourself in the face of mediocrity. I think it is a film about the impossibility of just that. There is no happy ending, no comfortable resolution, Lester ends up dead, and those around him frustrated, imprisoned, and weary. It's a film about the way in which society succeeds in alienating us from ourselves and each other, not about trite attempts to break out. Lester's job quitting and his buffing up don't succeed in bringing him happiness. Nor does Caroline's affair or rifle range education. It is the small, temporal moments that give us pleasure: small, fleeting visions of beauty in a cold and frustrating world. Overall, the film ends on a sour note (gorgeously contradicted by the score) and argues that simply refusing to cooperate doesn't stop the machine from turning.
Ignore the ignorami.
Anyone who gave this film a bad review is a close-minded, dim-witted fool. This is the greatest film I've ever seen in my life. It speaks directly to your soul, and those who disagree did not do as the film suggested; LOOK CLOSER!!
American Beauty 101
Take notes. There WILL be a test.
American Beauty is perhaps the most controversial film to ever win the Academy Award for Best Picture. To understand why it won, and why its triumph was so disagreeable to a large segment of the American public, I offer the following observations as a public service:
American Beauty is a satire of middle America that exposes its hypocrisy comedically while massaging those parts of the American psyche (mostly big city sophisticates or well to do suburbanites) who feel superior to the bourgeois mind. As such it makes those members of the audience who had expected to see a sort of Titanic of Suburbia uncomfortable while greatly pleasing fans of, say, Pulp Fiction or Blue Velvet.
Another way to look at American Beauty is as an exercise in fantasy wish-fulfillment. As such it delights those whose fantasies are realized and offends those who had different fantasies or whose fantasies remain repressed. Annette Bening's character gets her unspoken fantasy fulfilled as she is sexually liberated by "the King," a real estate salesman "clearly superior" to her mediocre husband, Lester, played by Kevin Spacey. Lester of course gets to live out his fantasy, that of telling the boss to shove it while winning the heart of the teen queen of his adolescent dreams. And Ricky Fitts, the boy next door, who might be your standard loser who eats his sack lunch behind where the drama geeks hang out, is in fact a smooth operator who deals dope discreetly (and successfully), gets the other beautiful girl and goes one or two up on his fascist dad. He is a sort of Homer Simpson denizen turned into a Humphrey Bogart for the new millennium. Note too that the gay guys down the street (except for their...uh, persuasion) are indistinguishable from any other over-socialized adorable yuppie couple just joining the community church. This is a little joke on the heartland, and a sly, oblique wish-fulfillment for some Hollywood homosexuals.
Since about half the audience really did expect to see Titanic or its equivalent, and instead got satire (something they can never really understand) you've got to expect some outrage. After all this was an Academy Award winning film entitled "American Beauty." What we should have here is an "America the Beautiful" kind of opulent production (perhaps with the "Heartland of America" feel of a Chevy truck commercial) done with the usual duplicity and an assuaging mentality. Any picture the Academy votes as best picture of the year ought to make us feel good about ourselves, don't you think? If we wanted "art" or liberal propaganda we'd have gone Off Broadway. Instead we are made uncomfortable about our secret desires and our hypocritical life style and the little lies we tell ourselves and friends.
As for those who merely think American Beauty was over-rated: you get a B+ because you're right, it was. If you also pointed out that Hollywood beat a few already very dead horses here (the war lover who is a closet gay or the straitlaced frigid wife who really just needs some vigorous sex) you get extra credit. And for those who think this was a great movie, it can be said you might be right. But any contemporary work of art, especially one that has as its subject matter the contemporary scene, can only be judged "great" some years down the road since we have, as yet, no real objectivity about ourselves or our culture.
Buy American Beauty at Amazon.com
Buy posters at Allposters.com
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