Overrated and pretentious

Rating: 3/10 (23 April 2006)

Imagine spending two hours with the most insufferable literary or art school poseurs you can think of - that's what watching American Beauty is like. Strangely, this klunker of a movie won an Academy Award, and lots of aging (and almost entirely male) Baby Boomer critics went ga-ga over it. It's funny viewed as weird family comedy, but still juvenile and pretentious. Like Mendes' other films, it's essentially lifeless, with wooden characters, clunky allegories, and obvious plot devices.
Many viewers and critics were taken in by the absurd hype surrounding this movie's supposedly "radical" or "deep" artistic meaning. Unfortunately for them, this meaning was already given to us long ago by far greater films like Easy Rider, The Graduate, Lolita, and others.
American Beauty is important historically for one reason: it was about the last time obsequious film critics and the Hollywood hype machine could bamboozle such a large number of film-goers with junk. Hollywood is now in a terminal tailspin as audiences are turning off its bad art and puffed-up "activists" as fast as they can.