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Director Sam Mendes leads us into an American heart of darkness with a spectacular performance by Kevin Spacey at the core of this modern-day morality play.
By STEVE PERSALL Times Film Critic
© St. Petersburg Times, published September 24, 1999
The flip side of any American Dream must be an American tragedy, since few of us succeed unless it is at the expense of others. Lester Burnham is teetering on the edge of this harsh duality in the opening minutes of American Beauty, a film brimming with delicious ironies that the title only begins to expose.
Lester calmly informs us of his middle-class malaise; it is at his expense that so many have benefited. He now has a failing career, a marriage maintained for the sake of children who don't care, and a drab routine that makes pleasuring himself in the shower the high point of each day. Lester announces that he'll be dead within a year. One of the strengths of Alan Ball's script is that it can quickly reveal the end of the movie and still keep the audience guessing how it will happen.
Suicide is certainly an option under these circumstances. Lester's wife, Carolyn, would gladly put him out of his and her misery. In a videotaped prologue, his daughter, Jane, asks the cameraman to kill her father, and he agrees. Neighbors will soon be painted as potential murder suspects. Or, perhaps the parents of a high school cheerleader who has Lester spellbound will violently protect their child.
Lester is doomed, no matter what happens. So, there is only one thing to do. Spurred by lust for something that the cheerleader merely represents, Lester regresses into adolescence, as if starting manhood over from scratch will enable him to do it right for himself this time. He quits his profession for a job at a fast-food window, buys a cherry-red Firebird, smokes pot like a chimney and pumps iron to achieve a Baywatch body.
Ball could stop right there and develop an entertaining story about a guy who learns to appreciate the green grass on his own side of the fence. That optimism does surface in American Beauty, but not until things have become so darkly comical that even a sunny finale seems smudged. Lester's metamorphosis causes a ripple effect that sends everyone around him into other emotional orbits. No one ends up like who they were in the beginning.
American Beauty is a stunning piece of work, boasting one of the richest and most cleverly tangled screenplays in years, plus a new filmmaker who cherishes each word and the actors delivering them. Sam Mendes makes an extraordinary debut after forging a Broadway reputation with a revival of Cabaret and last year's hit The Blue Room. Mendes' accomplishment is comparable to Bob Fosse, another Broadway stylist who left an indelible mark in cinema with, coincidentally, Cabaret in 1972.
Mendes loves his performers, framing their big moments with suburban metaphors and dizzily poetic fantasies. Or else pulling the camera so close to their faces that we're abducted into the characters' points of view. Only the finest actors can survive such scrutiny without a false move, or being overshadowed by Mendes' dreamy vision, perfectly rendered by veteran cinematographer Conrad Hall. American Beauty has that special kind of ensemble cast.
Kevin Spacey gives Lester a finely modulated madness in a performance that will likely become a hallmark of his career. Spacey adds a chilling resignation to early scenes of Lester's depression, then makes a midlife crisis appear so matter-of-fact that viewers might start checking their own mental state. As other roles expand around him, Lester becomes a supporting character in his own irredeemable life, with Spacey shifting into vagabond bliss.
More showy, and just as primed for an Oscar nomination, is Annette Bening's performance as Carolyn Burnham. Ball's script gives her a richly defined neurotic to portray, with harsh breakdown scenes balanced by giddy touches of compulsion such as Carolyn's matching gardening tool and gloves. Bening pulls out all the stops, yet maintains Carolyn's distance from caricature.
Thora Birch is impatiently sullen as Jane Burnham, a daughter who was embarrassed enough by her parents before Lester's change. Estrangement from her parents is compounded by the fact that her classmate Angela (Mena Suvari) appears to encourage Lester's creepy attention. Suvari also impresses with her role as a fantasy object, complete with red rose petals bursting from her bra in Lester's dream. The specter of pedophilia is raised by the plot device, yet softened by the script and the way Suvari and Spacey handle it.
Jane and Angela are complemented by Wes Bentley's creepy-cool performance as Ricky, a neighbor with a penchant for videotaping everything he sees, and seeing beauty in everything he tapes. Jane becomes a favorite subject for his lens, and at first she is repulsed. Ball uses these three actors to explore suburban youth detachment with more honest sympathy than any recent movie about teenage sex, drugs and status.
Mendes and Ball find time to pick over every bone in this neighborhood's closet. One house is the home of a gay couple (Scott Bakula, Sam Robards) whose friendly gesture gets an intolerant response from Ricky's father (Chris Cooper), a retired Marine officer. Ricky isn't treated much better, with his father's discipline leading to abuse and invasion of privacy. His mother (Allison Janney) isn't any help, since Dad has already bullied her into near catatonia.
Each scene in American Beauty has something to captivate a viewer. It could be a pristine moment of acting, a deviously turned phrase, a hypnotic camera move or set decoration, or Thomas Newman's perpetually intriguing musical score. It could be the simple image of a plastic bag blowing in the wind. The marvelous thing is that so many scenes combine those qualities into a memorable swan song for a beautiful loser.
Grade: A+
Director: Sam Mendes
Cast: Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, Thora Birch, Wes Bentley, Chris Cooper, Mena Suvari, Peter Gallagher, Allison Janney
Screenplay: Alan Ball
Rating: R; profanity, sexual situations, nudity, violence, drug abuse
Running time: 122 min.