Could have liked it . . .

Rating: Null/10 (29 August 2003)

Take the movie Office Space, expand it to the work-and-family-life setting, throw in some drama and depth, and sprinkle shallow metaphors on the top and you have American Beauty. The film is not without its good points and charms, however, it's somewhat over hyped in reviews. Certainly not award worthy, but then again, like the Oscars would know anything about award worthy material.
It earns points for exploring a narrative angle I've never quite seen before in live action cinema (even if it does borrow heavily from the `let's-make-a-movie-about losers' film trend like with Clerks, Office Space, Straight Story.) At least American Beauty is about fictitious characters and their portrayals remind of Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands, that other-worldly, suburban-storybook-ish, caricature-or in other words: none of the characters in American Beauty are real, but we don't care. It's not supposed to be. I won't bash them for being unrealistic, but I will criticize them for boring me.
I found Kevin Spacey's character the most entertaining, but then again I always like the characters who stop giving a damn and start speaking the thoughts we all want to say to the people around us. Beyond Kevin Spacey's performance and his character, not a single character throughout the rest of the film managed to keep my interest. Beyond that, none of the characters managed to acquire credibility in my mind. So with a cast of one interesting character, I didn't feel like lending my imagination to this film, didn't feel like getting into this film's world or suspending my disbelief too terribly far for it (ie this film really did nothing to capture my interest.)
The provocative' plot points came across as rhetorical and pseudo-philosophical instead of something genuinely worthy of discussion; the characters these provocative snippets come from seemed quite cliché and typical of what you'd expect to hear from them: the meaning, pleasures, and importance of life and beauty from a loser and a freak respectively. `Don't judge a book by its cover.' Lesson learned. Moral earned. How ironic! Been there. Done that. Bored me there too.
I do appreciate American Beauty's lack of a serious attempt at a plot. It moves along at its own pace, documenting the loose correlations of isolated events at key points in the timeline about these characters. Like with Kevin Smith's Clerks, American Beauty proves how overrated plot is and attempts to build on the characters alone and their lives, trials, and tribulations. The result is a quirky original film, which I love original and like quirky . . . but since I cared very little for the characters and the philosophy I didn't really like this quirky original film.