Some notes on how it ends

Rating: 6/10 (31 July 2000)

I discussed this with a friend and she, too, didn't like the ending; her quarrels was quite different from mine, and I think we were both right. I would advise you not to read on if you haven't seen the film. Yes, I know it's announced right at the start that Lester will shortly be dead; that isn't what I'm about to reveal.
MY problems were as follows. The film tells us about Lester's imminent demise TWICE at the start. It struck me at the time as unnecessary; I later found it was done so as to manipulate us into a silly game of guessing and second-guessing towards the end. Which one of the suspects before us will commit the fatal act? Will it be (a) the daughter, acting in concert with her lover? Or (b), the daughter's lover, acting alone? Or (c), the frustrated wife, smarting with shame? Or (d), the fascist-minded neighbour? In fact, we start by thinking we know that the answer is (a), but this is a trick of presentation that amounts to simple cheating. By presenting a not particularly crucial scene TWICE Mendes makes it seem important. But in any case, what's the point of this cat-and-mouse game with the viewer? Suddenly the picture becomes conventional and just a little stale.
Well, as everyone still reading knows, the answer is (d), which brings me to my second problem. The neighbour is driven to murder only because he's led to believe, falsely, that Lester is gay. How does he come to believe this? Sheer, flimsy chance. Had a window frame not conveniently occluded his view, had he not happened to watch a few "incriminating" minutes of videotape out of the hundreds of HOURS stored in his son's room, the tragedy would never have occurred. It's almost an eighteenth-century farce. Lester is not in any sense "doomed to die" at the start of the film; nor does he play with fire; his eventual death is as meaningless as, "and then he was hit by a falling piano", except that - and this is what makes it worse than the falling piano scenario - we are made to examine the fatal chain of events at ridiculous length.
Here are my friend's concerns. She thought a sudden death at the end was simply gratuitous; a tacked-on piece of pessimism to a story the logical conclusion of which would be happy. The death is (my friend pointed out) a good deal unhappier than I'd noticed. There's no indication that the neighbour will even be suspected of the murder; there's every indication that Jane and Ricky WILL be suspected. The videotape we saw twice will also be seen by the police. The two lovers cannot now flee to New York, both of them are likely to be imprisoned, and, to add insult to injury, Lester (like the film as a whole) ignores their fate entirely in his blissful ruminations on life that are meant to sum up the story. It's one thing to concentrate primarily on Lester to the exclusion of everyone else. It's quite another to tell us Jane's story as well, showing us incidents that don't concern him and which he will never even find out about - and then, in the end, leave his daughter in the lurch by simply forgetting about her. If Mendes wants to bring Lester's daughter into the story at all he can jolly well treat her with respect.
My long complaint may give a false impression. As it happens a sour conclusion is not nearly enough to sour the film as a whole: it's just so GOOD throughout. Simple, beautiful, moving scenes - the moment when Carolyn cries after degrading herself in front of potential customers, or the dinner-time argument after Lester quits work - are presented with an almost arrogant freshness; I was all the more disappointed with the conclusion because I had been lulled into believing that the film-makers were so skilled they couldn't possibly let me down. (And - think what you will of me for saying this - the sight of Thora Birch undressing and standing there topless would be worth sitting through a bad movie to see, let alone this one.) Taken all in all I'm very glad "American Beauty" was made.