American Beauty's Bad Breath

Rating: 3/10 (26 September 1999)

In the two weeks or so since I saw a preview of American Beauty, I've been wondering whether I saw the same American Beauty as everyone else. I can say without a doubt that the American Beauty that I saw was an awful movie.
Directed by Sam Mendes, American Beauty details the deterioration of a suburban American family, and focuses on the husband/father's (Kevin Spacey) mid-life crisis, wife/mother's (Annette Bening) infidelity, and Spacey and daughter's (Thora Burch) developing relationship with members of the household next-door. The movie opens with a cause for immediate concern--Spacey's disembodied voice telling us more than we'd ever want to hear from said type of voice, including his apparent knowledge of his fate. Now, voice-over narration is a technique that should almost always be avoided, one used well in very few instances of very few movies. In American Beauty, it is particularly onerous and intrusive, and, given that this is not a supernatural movie, completely inappropriate.
But there is more than this wrong with American Beauty: it's a movie that's never really sure if it wants to be a black comedy, though inroads in that direction fall short in as much as the humor is flat or cliche. Bening's performance is often painful to watch (as she's hamming it up). Worst of all is the extent that Mendes and co. expect us to inherently believe things about this nuclear family, making absolutely *no* effort to suspend our disbelief. The hatred of Spacey's character by both mother and daughter is unsupported: his daughter sites his lust for her friends, but while we see this directed toward one character in the movie there's no reason to believe this has ever happened before (the daughter doesn't speak to another young woman in the course of the whole movie!). Bening's character, oblivious to his wandering lust, is also shown to have strong feelings against him, but the worst he's done is catch her with her lover. Maybe suburbanites just naturally hate dear old dad. The movie even includes a couple of gratuitous topless scenes of the young women in the movie (and I'm no prude), and an utterly fake sex scene between Bening's body double and the lover.

The one bright spot in this movie is the performance of Wes Bentley as the young man next door who sees the beauty in life others do not. Alas, if the movie were about him, or only if his video of a plastic bag swirling in the breeze lasted much, much longer. Make no mistake about it, American Beauty--yes, _that_American Beauty--suffers from a serious case of bad breath.