Blech...

Rating: 4/10 (11 October 1999)

"American Beauty" is the sometimes amusing, mostly irritating story of Lester Burnham, a middle aging, frustrated suburban schmuck and his dysfunctional (is there any other kind?) family. His wife, Carolyn, is a brittle, self-centered bitch. His moody 16-year old brat of a daughter, Jane, hates the sight of him because "he's such a lame-o". The film follows Lester as he goes through the standard Hollywood mid-life crisis, complete with a new job, hot car,and hot pants for Angela Hayes, his daughter's beautiful friend. Although these scenes are funny,the screenwriter is obviously trying to make this film more than a simple comedy. Therefore there are a lot of silly "artistic drama" touches that just don't work. Spacey is great, but with every scene that does not features Spacey's character, the film grinds to a halt. Most annoying is the "Dawson's Creek" sub-plot featuring Jane Burnham (Thora Birch) and the ultra-creepy, drug-dealing boy next door. What was supposed to come off as a touching story of two misfits finding love seems more like two insufferable, precocious brats feeding off each other's neuroses. The scene where the boy relates to Jane how he found God in a discarded plastic bag are hilariously pretentious. St. Augustine had nothing on this guy.
Annette Benning's distractingly over-the-top performance as Caroline doesn't help much either. Benning plays this character with all the subtlety Divine gave to Francine Fishpaw in "Polyester" (I bet John Waters laughed his ass off when he saw this tripe)

There are only two things that keep this film from being total junk. Spacey's performance throughout the film and the scene at the end where Jane's friend Angela (played by an amazing young actress named Mena Suvari) who had previously been disregarded by everyone as a shallow, egotistical, sex-pot breaks her facade to show Lester what a insecure, lonely girl she really is. If the rest of the film had the emotional honesty of this scene, it would have been a masterpiece. It seems to me that if the characters in this film weren't such selfish idiots, their various problems and miseries would have been solved in thirty seconds. Then we would have been spared this movie.