In trying to provide clever satirical commentary and be deep and thoughtful, American Beauty exposes how shallow and underdeveloped it really is

Rating: 4/10 (17 December 2019)

It makes perfect sense how American Beauty has aged so poorly, but I am surprised by how much both audiences and critics loved it at the time of release. More than anything, American Beauty is completely all over the place thematically and has uninteresting and motivationless characters. Mendes wants to make a satire on suburban life and how a family's life falls apart in many tiny ways, but the pieces simply don't cohere. Lester is the protagonist and vehicle for the surburban crisis and upheaval the family goes through, but Mendes (and honestly more so Ball's script) can't decide what light to paint him in, or even what moral message his actions are meant to send. Once the scene is set with this seemingly average suburban family, we see Lester's frustrations mount and his small rebellions, from his lust for Angela to his smoking weed to quitting his job. As he becomes more open and shameless about these transgressions (which, it is worth noting, are framed and reacted to by Lester and his family as equally reprehensible, which is another frustration I had), he gets happier and his body language is noticeably freer. Gone is the hunched over, quiet dad, replaced with the dad who throws asparagus at the wall and says what he wants. I guess this says don't bottle up your frustrations? Then, after seeing his wife is having an affair and Angela offers herself to him, Lester is played as the hero, given an easy out and framed as happy and doing an honorable thing by not having sex with her, only to die right after as a martyr. His character certainly didn't deserve such an ending, and the final voiceover rings hollow as can be - Mendes tries to hand wave a larger message about how the world is beautiful and he feels nothing but gratitude looking back at his life? If I'm taking any coherent message from this jumbled film (which, I want to be absolutely clear, I am not), it would be far from something about the world having beauty and instead something about how people have expectations of the people they should be and hide their true desires behind these false personas. Even this is contradicted in some cases, as Carolyn is a perfect example. She never feels like a real person, and after having Lester find out about her affair she is prepared to shoot him only to find someone else had done it for her. It's not clear what she wanted all movie (except to sell that one house early on), and it couldn't be less clear why she was muttering "I will not be the victim" repeatedly as she prepared to confront her husband with a gun. Her character is extremely poorly written and has a nonsensical arc. Angela is actually a pretty good character, injecting some humor into the film and with a strong performance. The interplay between her and Jane is good, if nothing more than standard high school social screenplay, and the late reveal that she was a virgin emphasized the degree to which she was performing the role she was expected to have, and wasn't really who she claimed to be. Jane is also on the more nuanced side of characters in this movie, written much more realistically than the adults in this movie and one of the only characters we can sympathize with. Ricky is a decent character, but the events with his father at the end, culminating in his father trying to kiss Lester and then coming back and shooting him were really forced. The gay repression storyline was a prime example of the movie trying to be smart and deep and coming off as extremely shallow - the father is ashamed of his sexuality so he sees the worst in his son and lashes out, and then when he finds someone he thinks he can trust, the father finds out he was wrong and kills Lester. The "twists" of who actually killed Lester were truly stupid, especially because it adds literally nothing to the story since both were prepared to kill him. The score also didn't work for me at all, with several montages using the score to act like a character is doing well and getting things done as the marimba plays faster, and it feels contrived and heavy handed. It's not a dull film, and I don't even think it's particularly poorly made, with some good cinematography (I like the rose petals evoking fantasy sequences and the allure of lust and love) and mostly believable performances, but the script is so bad and so convinced that it's clever as to ruin the film. While not similar in any way in type of film, as I ponder the themes and messages that pervade the film, I feel more and more that none of these pieces fit together or make any sense, similarly to how I felt as I thought about Vice. It's the ending, trying to tie everything together as a message of beauty in life, that really convinces me that this is simply not a good movie, that the director's vision falls flat here. As this is my first Mendes film, I'm strongly hoping and expecting to like Jarhead and 1917 more.