Plastic Surgery

Rating: Null/10 (7 February 2000)

This is rather an accomplished movie. It's easy to make generalisations about national identities, typically negative and insufficiently self-critical. Certain aspects of American contemporary culture even grate against the sensibilities of this reviewer, but I was delighted to have recognised an aspect of the American psyche that I'd hitherto found appealing represented in this film.
That aspect is best represented in an intimate moment between the teenage neighbours, Wes and Thora, after the couple have viewed Wes's favourite piece of film-making. Moved by his own commentary of the footage of a plastic bag vacilliating in the wind against a brick wall, Wes is comforted by Thora in a moment of pure, unadulterated confiding, culminating in their touching. What I found particularly commendable about their exchange, and peculiarly American, was the candour and confidence with which they related to one another each others' feelings.
The film is littered not with plastic bags but with equally dramatic exchanges, such as Lester's compassion (played by the superlative Mr Spacey) towards the tragi-comic, and misdirected, coming-out of his neighbour, Colonel Fitt; and his equally noble resolve not to penetrate Angela, his dream-object come submissive in real life . . at the moment at which she most confided him.
Beauty may not be only skin-deep, but in exploring that aesthetic, the film does us the service of not disregarding whatever evident beauty may prefigure in Angela either.
There is also a beauty in the disembodied voice of Lester, at the beginning and at the close of the film, alerting us both to his future demise and to the putative general truth of the facts about ours. I have only to say that this is one of the few successful voice-overs in cinematic history (see also Fearless (1993)), the potential for wanton audio-visual narrative clash being the norm (e.g. (The) Fight Club (1999), Bringing Out the Dead (1999), Legend of 1900 (1998), to name but a few recent hang-overs).
It is typical of the accessibility of this film that it depicted in its vision of beauty an everyday, non-biodegradable object, a plastic bag.