Wow - look a lot closer...

Rating: Null/10 (21 May 2001)

Rating: 9/10
The term Â‘comedy drama' does this film no justice. It merely confines an unsettlingly beautiful film with the restrictions of an insipid label that it so clearly surpasses. The superlative level on which all this films operates is unchartered territory- never before has a film come so close to being an actual work of art. American Beauty contains a disturbing composition of escapisms never before explored in modern cinema.
American Beauty delves us into the banal world of Lester Burnham, (Spacey, in serious Oscar form), a bored 42 year old writer who's highlight of the day is `whacking off' during his morning shower. He has lost all affection for his vain, realty agent wife, Caroline (Bening), his bitter teenage daughter Jane (one very mature Birch) reviles him, (`I wish someone would just put him out of his misery') and he antagonises with them both on a daily basis. Worst of all, he feels tired, alienated and ordinary living in the dull realms of upper middle class suburbia.
This flat world of resentment and hypocrisy comes to a startling halt when Jane's beautiful best friend Angela (American Pie's Suvari) enters his life. Along with her comes a glorious fantasy world in which Lester becomes lost, yet oddly liberated. He quits that boring job, he begins to smoke pot, he starts working out. He does what he feels again.
Peppered throughout what is essentially Lester's mid-life crisis, are a menagerie of erratic and unstable characters who each have their many complexlayers peeled back petal by petal as the film progresses.
In Caroline, Annette Bening plays out the insecure and temperamental icon that is the modern woman with such magnitude and vigor, that each movement, each expression she makes is brimming with a multitude of complexities.
Birch composes a creature of diverse radiance and intellect in Janie, a true beauty in the sense of the word, trapped in an oppressive, unsuppourtive environment. Suvari as the object of Lester's affections produces an enigmatic creature in Angela, extensively ranging from confident to vulnerable, fibreless to fragile-her character surprises you.
Bentley proves himself a breakthrough force to be reckoned with as Ricky Fittz, the Burnham's voyeuristic neighbour, drug dealer and sometimes waiter who steals young Janie's heart. His poignancy and vulnerability invoke both pity and hope as he pursues something more pure and beautiful than any of the other flawed characters are capable of.
The most disturbing and powerful performances though come from Chris Cooper and Allison Janney in the relatively minor roles of Ricky's parents, Colonel and Barbara Fitts. Both portray their fragmentary and removed characters with such a masterful helplessness, that they resonate an eerie presence on one's memory that remains long you have left the theatre.
In his first venture into celluloid, theatre director Mendes has captured all the beauty and culture of the stage and transcended it onto the screen. He skillfully extracts each wrenching emotion and each sarcastic moment from both his cast and Alan Ball's poignant screenplay. This, combined with Thomas Newman's unsettling score and all the other brilliant aspects of this film creates a uniformed creative relationship that allows them to play out the breath taking realms of fantasy as well as the harsh actualities of reality on the screen.
Despite the anger, the banality, the bitterness and basic ugliness of everydayness that plays out on screen, American Beauty is a beautiful and lucid film with an oddly calming effect. It is a one of a kind. Disturbing yet beautiful. Haunting yet hilarious. Touching yet distant.
Go and see this film, you've never seen anything else like it.