For now, it looks like greatness

Rating: 10/10 (21 August 2000)

It's impossible to know what, in 20 years, 50 years or 100 years, will be a classic. Sometimes, art looks deeply profound simply because it works in its time, addresses issues and anxieties of the moment. I don't think this is true of American Beauty.
It's 24 hours since I watched this film and it keeps bubbling up into my mind. There's so much here, it's difficult to get a grip on it all. Very rarely, one comes across a book or a play or a film that rethinks everything from scratch, that redefines the way we think about how we live. Actually, it's hardly ever a film. But this is one that does. It's deeply subversive - it just feels like the beginning of a different world view.
I read the other user reviews before I wrote this and, yes, now I can see some of the cracks in the glaze. But nothing's quite perfect and this is a film which deserves a full 10. Old Fitz might be a stereotype but I didn't notice - the atmosphere of repressed violence in his house was too horribly compelling. As for those people who scored it low - you really have missed something - it is your loss.
American Beauty is sauntering dangerously along the edges of some very dubious territory. It could have become a male mid-life crisis wish fulfilment film, a kind of macho Shirley Valentine or Thelma and Louise (excellent though these are) and it nearly did. It could have been another 'burb film. It could have been a voyeuristic Lolita film. It could have been Happiness. It was none of these.
In particular, it was not Happiness and this opens it immediately to criticism. Whereas Happiness was bleak and ultimately nihilistic, American Beauty is bleak and life affirming. That presents the carpers with a case for the most dreaded charge of all: sentimentality. I contend that you simply can't have optimism without seeming sentimental. So be it. We can take a little sweetness. This is a movie sufficiently complex and ambiguous to support it. At the same time, cinema, especially in America, has never quite shaken off its middlebrow associations, always leaving directors open to easy jibes of pretentiousness. We have such a negative culture that it actually feels clever to pick holes, to criticise where the establishment critics praised. But it's easy to distinguish the pretentious from the true. I know how I thought and felt afterwards.
I don't think a movie can change your life but if any ever had a chance this one was close. I certainly laughed a couple of times, recoiled in fear and horror once and cried several times. I don't ask for a lot more than this.