Welcome to to the Burnham Family.

Rating: 9/10 (13 April 2000)

We fly over Suburbia LA as the dead Lester Burnham narrates his wisdom on modern life, that commences with a morning masturbation session in the shower, followed by the rest of the day that goes down hill from there. This SUNSET BOULEVARD approach of the dead man narrating works a treat here as we now know what happens to him, but it's the why and who that intrigues us. The first image of the movie shows his daughter, Jane, on video, wishing his sleazy father was dead. But surely they couldn't give us that much information all in the opening minutes. So we sit there and wait in wonder.
To distract us from who is going to do the killing of Lester, we enter via another door with the plaque, "Mid-Life Crises". That's the excuse they use when someone in his early forties goes through a radical change in life. A poor title for a poor excuse. What Lester shows us through the pen of script writer, Alan Ball, is that the so-called mid-life crises is the realisation that there is more to life than the game you are playing. This comes through Lester's deteriorating relationship with his wife, Carolyn and daughter Jane. His job is an absolute bore and it seems he won't be able to hold it down any longer. What turns the tables is the meeting of two teenage kids. One is Jane's friend, Angela, the blonde beauty who supplies the rose pedals in Lester's dreams, giving him that extra push to live so he could conquer her. The other is the dope, supplied by the video freak neighbour, Ricky, which relaxes him and allows him to relive those teenage years where loud Seventies music accompanies the cruising of your vehicle.
Lets not forget the rest of the Burnham family. We have wife Carolyn, struggling to make something of herself as a Real Estate Agent. She lives in a picture perfect world with a perfect house, a perfect rose garden, perfect car and perfect body with looks to match. But the insides of the mind are rotting away as her failure turns to other options to save her, mainly that of an affair. Daughter Jane is still young and could be spared of this life. She tends to hang back and watch her parents go round the bend. But they soon spill into her territory, where she really doesn't want them. It's the relationship with the neighbour Ricky and his video camera that awakens her.
There we have the supposedly dysfunctional middle class American family. Next is the neighbours. What is Suburbia without them? If you are facing the Burnham house, you would find that to their left lives a gay couple and to their right lives the Nazi Colonel, Frank Fitts and family. In the centre is the Burnham family, who would rather stay that way with their political ideology because it's always safe to just sit on the fence.
Writer, Alan Ball, has drawn the perfect symbolic structure of life, not only in America but everywhere. This film will be viewed as the RAZOR'S EDGE of the Twenty First century, where humans don't have to travel in search of the meaning to their existence, but only have to look into their own back yard to find it. Lester Burnham does just that and maybe finds it all that little bit too late.
First time director, Sam Mendes, makes a proper job out of Ball's script with the help of Conrad L. Hall's photography. But one cannot help and think of the early films of Atom Egoyan when viewing the style and approach, (FAMILY VIEWING, SPEAKING PARTS, CALENDER) . Maybe its because of the relationship between Ricky and the video imagery. Atom's films dealt with the video medium as the main thrust in shaping human lives. There is also the photographic style in the wide shots, that if you freeze them, they become the perfect family portrait. It's only when the images move do we see the ugly side. For a British theatre director to cross over into a Hollywood film, Mendes did an astounding job in showing us the American psyche.

To cap it all off is the performances. Kevin Spacey has a ball as Lester. Annette Bening as Carolyn almost hams it up but never crosses that line of absurdity. Thora Birch as Jane is the only one that keeps the top on her performance, giving her that air of mystery. Mena Suvari as Angela is the perfect wet dream who seems to have come out of one of those bad teenage school campus flics of the Eighties. Peter Gallagher as Buddy Kane, the sleazy Real Estate agent, is very effective in a small role. The mad Colonel Frank Fitts as played by Chris Cooper adds that extra edge, something for the audience to boo at. And last but not least is the brilliant Wes Bentley as the video freak, Ricky Fitts. One cannot help but notice the similarity of looks between him and director Sam Mendes!