Familiar tale, entertainingly told, but no masterpiece.

Rating: 8/10 (26 November 1999)

I was tempted to give this movie a lower rating than it actually deserves (about an "8" I'd say) just to help bring it down from its ridiculously lofty IMD perch as the second greatest movie ever made. Having just watched the DVD releases of Joan of Arc, Chinatown, and Grand Illusion, I would rank American Beauty as maybe the fourth best film I've seen in the past week. Is it a good film? Yes. Is it worth the extraordinary hype it has received? Certainly not. The cinematography is excellent (as one might expect from Conrad Hall, the cinematographer of In Cold Blood, Butch Cassidy, and Cool Hand Luke among other truly great films). The script has some clever turns and some wonderful black humor. And with Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening for starters, the casting and acting is first rate. However the story and its themes are painfully familiar, bordering on the clichÃ©d. Maybe the studied allusions to other movies (e.g. Sunset Boulevard; Sex, Lies, and Videotape) are intended as clever post-modernism (i.e. the film is really about earlier films), but most audiences seem to think the film is making some great statement about the sterility of contemporary American family life. That I don't see.