Mendes and Ball scrape hole through bottom of the cliché barrel.

Rating: 3/10 (3 June 2005)

Uttter garbage. A plastic bag floating in the wind is supposedly some profound, poetic reflection on the beauty of life, oh my poor little God! This film is about beauty, huh? Is this one big ironic joke? I looked closer but I could see no discernible method or meaning through the orgiastic mirage of clichéd to death characters and annoying dialog. No, I declare, there is no beauty here!
I can see there is something in this film that will appeal to some people, however I was not the least bit impressed by this tasteless and pathetic excuse for satire. The acting is pretty decent but the characters are all highly irritating and idiotic clichés that represent some of the worst aspects of modern society. Granted It sometimes looks pretty good but the plot is trashy, predictable, nasty and inane, like the plastic bag. I know I will be told to 'look closer' but no thanks. I could take a dump and watch it float around and ponder how it reflects on life instead. I would probably come to the conclusion that it accurately depicts how in cinema s**t always seems to float, especially at the Academy Awards, now isn't that beautiful?
Well I understand that American Beauty is supposedly a satire on the plastic image of American suburbia and the petty, 'silly little lives' of it's residents, great, nothing new there. If your going to do satire that does not mean you just throw in every cliché in the book and poke fun at it. This was just PREDICTABLE and unoriginal, I wanted it to be challenging and do something new, but no it just forced us to sit through the ever increasing silliness of Lester's mid life crisis and did not try to challenge any of the issues unless they were easily resolved with a clichéd or ridiculous situation. Wow, so a sad old man is rebelling, are we supposed to feel uplifted by this, are we supposed to be endeared to this 'every man'? OMG he just quit his crappy high paid job, whoopee! Now he's smoking dope, hurray what a hero! Now he is lusting after a teenage girl, man this guy is the best! How original, how fun and 'shocking', this is entertainment at it's best, or so we are lead to believe. This film is sickeningly crude. Crude can be effective as long as it is done right but when your not sure what the film is trying to achieve it's not a good thing, I was not sure if this film was trying to be funny or deadly serious and profound, it was neither in the end, to me anyway. I did at least have some fun playing an unexpected game of 'guess the cliché' every time a new character was introduced, hmmm a geeky teenage boy, let me guess - he smokes dope, hates his parents and looks for poetic meaning in inane things? - correct, hurrah! I just don't understand how/why this silly film is so loved. I mean what were the intentions here? At least other trashy films have clear intentions, but where are American Beauty's?
That plastic bag bit is perhaps the most stupid and annoying thing I have ever seen in a film ever. I know this sequence is supposed to illustrate that beauty is in the eye of the beholder etc and this is supposed to relate to the film (somehow) blah, blah, blah but really I don't care, and that dork was just plain shallow, and annoying so it defeated the purpose! The same goes for the whole film really, if the last 10 minutes was some sort of (extremely amateurish) attempt at redemption then it had much the same effect as the bag scene, it was invalidated by everything else around it. Was Lester's sudden moment of clarity (as alcoholics would call it) and the last sequence supposed to be beautiful and poetic? The question I ask is, why make us sit through 2 hours of nonsense without challenging anything of importance and then try to turn it all on it's head and sum it all up in 10 minutes? Is this meant to reflect life itself? If that's the case then fine, but heck was it sloppily written and executed. I assume that it's all about looking for beauty, and the rest of the film concentrated on the crude, rebellious behavior of Lester to try and make us realize that, in the end, there was a person of beauty and emotion trying to break through that petty, immature facade, if we 'look closer', and this idea can be applied to life itself. Even if that is the (yawnsome) case they could have told us much sooner! I don't find it fun to sit for 2 hours and try to look behind some tiresome, poorly conceived clichéd characters and horrendous displays of bad screen writing in search of some humanity and meaning then have it thrown at me in the last 10 minutes, after I had stopped caring. Sorry but this film is just a prime example of poor plot construction and script writing. I was actually left amazed by how little this movie affected me despite so obviously attempting to do something of the sort, I felt nothing (apart from mild anger), perhaps this was the ultimate irony that Mendes and Ball were looking to achieve. They wanted to desensitize me, like society is trying to do. Oh the horror! Anyway, films like this are old news nowadays and like extreme feminism and reality T.V many folk are now finally becoming tired of such trash, this film will be more or less forgotten in 5 years, I bet you! American Beauty is in the eye of the beholder though, but I don't want it in my eyes ever again thank you very much. 2 stars for acting, 1 for cinematography, 0 for everything else = 3 stars.