Soap opera for bourgeois-bashers

Rating: Null/10 (15 April 2004)

Pier Paolo Pasolini once said, "Whatever the bourgeois do, they are wrong", and the 20th century is littered with literature, cinema and art dedicated to bourgeois-bashing. Nothing, it seems, appeals more to the pseudo intellect and culture vulture than a good jab at the middle class.
Why?
As Mailer slyly observed, "the 'artist' labours under the illusion that he is fundamentally classless". Such an individual is therefore free to attack the mores of the stilted conservative middle-brow. He is of course bohemian and liberal and free from the constraining modes of bourgeois thought. Invariably though, he is as middle-brow as the types he attacks, and sheepish at his lack of noble peasant heritage. Therefore such polemics are merely self-flagellation.
'American Beauty' is an incredibly contrived piece of work. Contrived to illicit huge guilt assuaging, middle-brow applause and all the attendant awards that brings.
Its viewpoint is that of the artistic liberal. The middle-aged, middle-class heterosexual union is stagnant and repressive. A veritable breeding ground for infidelity and discontent. The corporate workplace which financially sustains it is soul-crushing and corrupt. The harshly disciplinarian, ex-military father is a implosive, repressed homosexual who collects guns and Nazi tableware. The 'out' male homosexual couple are paragons of attractive, fully functioning gracious humanity. And guilt-free capitalists to boot.
All of the teenagers are deeply unlikeable and speak in inverted commas as if distancing themselves from their own existences. But they are basically good kids corrupted and misled by their parents false values.
These characters are drawn in crude broad strokes, reducing them to soap-opera /pantomime types and thus allowing the (almost entirely middle-class) audience a sense of detached superiority.
Inevitably the film trips over its own muddled morality. It's middle-aged 'hero' is merely regressing to juvenilia, his 'freedom' a contextually different reiteration of the obsession with eternal youth and beauty. The male teenage protagonist obtains his funds through drug-dealing. But the proceeds pay for his technologically assisted insight, so thats okay.
And, hey. It's only grass he's selling, after all.
Despite all of this the film is not unenjoyable. It is beautiful to look at (visually it owes a deal to Lynch and Kubrick), and the fabled Kevin Spacey charm makes it's central character more sympathetic than he otherwise should be. Thomas Newman's ubiquitous new-agey score ties it all together, cleverly adding to the films entirely spurious sense of significance. The tedious symbolism likewise flatters it's audiences (no doubt) refined sense of aesthetics.
One of the most overrated films of recent times.