American Beauty is a kind of Lolita for the new millennium.

Rating: 9/10 (19 October 2002)

American Beauty is a kind of Lolita for the new millennium, an imaginative look at contemporary American society. In director Sam Mendes's reappraisal of American mores, that American suburban scene is killingly dull-an oppressive miasma looms depleting the atmosphere of oxygen and covering those captive in its oppressive clouds with a deep layer of pain and angst. What American Beauty chronicles is a collective failure, both of energy and of spirit in American society. What has become defunct in our me-first, dot-com society is our capacity for wonder and our ability to conduct valid human interaction. What we now have, instead, is a tremendous vacuum and a collective longing that must be filled at any price.
The film has the New-Age flavor of people seeking desperately for meaning in their lives and for spiritual sustenance. American Beauty depicts middle-aged suburbanites Lester and Carolyn Burnhams' misguided attempts to exorcise this longing through extra-marital sexual liaisons. These desperate attempts to recapture love and security are obviously doomed from the start. Lester (Kevin Spacey) becomes infatuated with his daughter's beautiful friend, Angela, and Carolyn (Annette Bening) initiates an affair with fellow real estate agent Buddy Kane. These parallel quests to recapture what they have lost-Lester in pursuing the specious passion of youth, and Carolyn by imbibing the Lethe of her career and new love interest-create the dramatic tension of the film.
Lester is a walking dead man. This is not a spoiler; we learn this fact in the first few minutes of the film. The film comprises, then, a kind of retrospective of the dead, a look at what went wrong in Lester's life and marriage-and why. The film does not provide any useful answers for the audience, however, who, we assume, may very well be suffering in some degree the same problems that plagued Lester prior to his death. Any implied solutions are easily negated by the fact that Lester has little time to savor his new-found wisdom, for he is snuffed out, a victim of a cruel twist of fate. And this is not exactly a fair return for one's troubles. Given these considerations, it is difficult for me to believe that Lester especially wanted to die, after finally having solved his angst and his spiritual and sexual frustrations.
Carolyn is not as aware as Lester that there is a deep emptiness in their lives. But she too seeks some value some thing in which to believe, and this becomes here career which soon subsumes all of her other passions and interests (except, perhaps her gardening). In an earlier decade she would have been a political radical, as Eric Hoffer terms it, a "true believer." She approaches her work as a real estate agent as if were a religion that will save her from the emptiness she feels in her life. One morning we see her compulsively cleaning a throughly dirty house she wishes to show later that day. She is almost frenzied in her effort, almost losing control at one point, until she cries her mantra, "Successful people project an aura of success." But mere capitalism, however decadent, is not to blame here.
American males (and I am not exempting myself in this accusation) appear to be plagued by a fetish about certain female institutions: cheerleaders (because they remind us of our lost youth, Bruce Springstein's "Glory Days"), and young girls (the Lolita syndrome) for the same reason. Both are subconscious attempts to recapture our lost youth, a time when sex was a mysterious "potentiality" and sexuality still a potent, mythical force in our lives. If we wish to verify the truth of the Lolita syndrome, we only have to remind ourselves of the debacle on Long Island a half dozen years ago. The press sensationalized Amy Fisher (Joe Buttafuko's 16-year-old lover) as the "Long Island Lolita." She has recently been granted parole and is writing a book about her experiences. Perhaps we shall be seeing this book made into a picture by Hollywood?
In American Beauty, the rose is an ambiguous symbol at best. The more one reflects on the symbol, the more it resonates with meaning upon meaning. Traditionally, in literature, the rose has been a symbol of perfection. In T. S. Eliot we have the rose garden as the ultimate symbol for man's vision of perfection, the ultimate epiphany, and farther back we have Dante's vision of God as a multifoliate rose, a beatific vision of paradise. In the film, we have the rose as sexual metaphor, and not a very subtle one at that. The "American Beauty" is a type of rose, of course, the very type that Carolyn cultivates, and the "American Beauty" is also the daughter's friend, the object of Lester's lust and his misplaced romantic idealism.