Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
Kevin Spacey keeps a biting suburban satire from eating itself alive.
Sep 15, 1999 | Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) is dead at the beginning of "American Beauty." He tells us so, apparently speaking in voice-over from some unspecific Great Beyond. He is most certainly dead at the end, when his whole life literally flashes before his eyes (a grievous, laughable filmmaking mistake). In between, we see the last year of Lester's life, as he struggles to awaken from the stupor of 20 years in the suburbs, trapped in his loveless family and his meaningless job. To Carolyn (Annette Bening), his judgmental harpy of a wife, and Jane (Thora Birch), his glum and uncommunicative teenage daughter, Lester appears to be in the grip of an especially ridiculous midlife crisis. He quits his job, buys a 1970s muscle car, begins lifting weights and smoking pot, and develops a Humbert Humbert-like obsession with one of Jane's classmates. But for Lester, this is a battle of mythic and heroic proportions. He is trying to save his soul, trying to prepare himself to face death -- although he doesn't know it's coming so soon -- with no regrets.
Based on the impassioned post-screening discussion I enjoyed with three other viewers, "American Beauty" will sharply divide its audience. That's usually a good thing. A strident suburban satire plagued by an exaggerated tone and multiple layers of implausibility, "American Beauty" accomplishes more in its incoherence than most Hollywood movies do in tidy, soulless success. It's remarkable that any movie that's so ambitious and angry -- and that treats ordinary American life so seriously -- made it through the mainstream production channels in the first place. Plenty of "independent" films aren't half this daring. For all its flaws, "American Beauty" offers one of the best ensemble casts you'll see in any American movie this year. Side by side with its false notes and awkward missteps, it has moments of startling pathos and piercing, painful hilarity.
Director Sam Mendes, best known for his recent Broadway productions of "Cabaret" and David Hare's "The Blue Room," makes his film debut here. And though he is capable of subtlety -- the budding love affair between Jane and Ricky (Wes Bentley), the loner/voyeur who lives next door, is handled with great tenderness -- Mendes' basic idea here is to turn up the heat on Alan Ball's script well past the boiling point. When Lester first sees Angela (Mena Suvari), Jane's blond nymphet pal, cheerleading at a basketball game, he instantly goes all goggle-eyed and travels into an elaborate fantasy world in which Angela's body virtually explodes with rose petals. I suppose Mendes wants to make the point that Angela is more the trigger than the cause of Lester's transformation. But this aesthetic vision feels a long way from actual lust, which is most often a nagging, grinding, insatiable sensation, more like a chronic infection than a seizure.
Liberated from his customary role as an inscrutable evildoer, Spacey turns in a richly comic performance as a man visibly intoxicated by his every impulse. He gets high with Ricky outside a horrific dinner party where Carolyn is shamelessly schmoozing the self-styled "King of Real Estate" (Peter Gallagher). Lester blackmails his boss out of $60,000 and drives home singing along with "American Woman." He lifts weights in the nude after hearing Angela teasingly tell Jane she thinks her dad is hot. (Spacey's legion of admirers will find plenty to enjoy here.) Even sprawled on the couch in jeans, attacking Carolyn with a remote-controlled toy truck like a rambunctious toddler, he seems infused with an inexplicable glee. He can't tell good ideas from bad ones, and relishes the fact that he doesn't know what will happen next.
Carolyn is a much bigger problem, although I don't know whether to blame Mendes, the script or Bening, whose formidable acting chops are expended on a feverish, sexually repressed demon whose few tiny moments of possible redemption are undermined by burlesque. This is a woman who, as Lester tells us in his opening voice-over, has matching pruning shears and gardening clogs. In case we haven't figured out that she's the embodiment of American materialism, the script lays it out for us. When Carolyn snaps at Lester for nearly spilling his drink on the couch, he responds, "This is just stuff. And it's become more important to you than living. And, honey, that's nuts." She literally beats herself up after failing to sell a house -- her ad describing a "lagoon-like pool" has gotten her in trouble -- and prostitutes herself to a rival realtor. Perhaps it's not surprising that Carolyn hates both herself and Lester so much. But both parties in a dreadful marriage are always simultaneously the authors and victims of their situation, and absent some understanding of that, "American Beauty" turns Carolyn into a misogynist caricature for no good purpose.
Similarly, the film's supporting characters, although all well-played, are a mixed bag. Birch is terrific as the moody and absent Jane, who has long ago given up on both her parents (although it's highly unlikely that this disaffected girl would be a cheerleader). If we can guess almost from the outset that Angela's junior-sexpot image masks tremendous insecurity, Suvari ("American Pie") plays the role with highly convincing hunger and depth. Bentley, with his chiseled jaw and limpid, almost feminine eyes, brings a soulful intensity to the mysterious Ricky. But as much as I wanted to like and believe in Ricky, an openhearted spiritual seeker who remains undamaged by the constant abuse he suffers from his Marine-officer father (Chris Cooper), the film asks him to carry far too much freight. We're expected to believe that he's dealing awesome pot and compiling an immense library of peeping-tom videos under his dad's nose, and to accept his stoner-mystic insights that there is "an entire life behind things" and that "an incredibly benevolent force" speaks to him.
Amid the emphatic and often original stew of vitriol and humor in "American Beauty," it gets pretty hard to tell whether Mendes and Ball are actually trying to say something, and if so, what that might be. The fuzzy, lyrical intrusions of New Age spirituality that bracket the story, although strikingly at odds with the overall tone, suggest that there is more meaning in the universe than in Lester's wasted, tragicomic life. Like the film's rather forced obsession with homosexuality -- centered on Cooper's paranoid, homophobic colonel -- these moments seem both revelatory and opaque, as if momentarily exposing themes the rest of the movie takes great pains to bury. Perhaps future film scholars can decipher "American Beauty" as a Buddhist allegory of existence, or a critique of heterosexual manhood. For now it remains a puzzling dream, vivid in detail and overly obvious in symbolism, fueled by half-digested lumps of malice and wonder.
Get Salon in your mailbox!