True and Original

Rating: 6/10 (25 May 2000)

...Unfortunately, as a critic once noted about the book under his review, the true parts aren't original, and the original parts aren't true.
Let's start with the true parts. As most know by now, American Beauty follows the tragicomic trajectory of an unhappily married middle-aged bourgeois, whose attempt to escape the drabness of middle-class life through a passionate infatuation with another only succeeds in destroying the lives of all involved. Sound familiar? It should: Flaubert dealt with it 150 years ago, in "Madame Bovary."
But it's not necessary to go back that far. Critiques of American middle-class culture are about as plentiful as McDonald's in Riverside: take Ginsberg's "Howl," Heller's underappreciated "Something Happened," and almost anything by Updike, Roth, or Cheever, for starters. In film, one doesn't have to look farther than Billy Wilder's "The Apartment" (literally, in my case: it's on TV as I type this). Anyone recall "The Graduate"? ""I have one word for you: plastics" was pithier and more penetrating about American mass culture than anything in this movie. "I've Heard the Mermaids Singing" mined the theme of the misfit artist well before this, and much more affectingly. The related theme of "sane" American society as a lunatic asylum, and the "lunatics" as rebellious artists, goes directly back to R. D. Lang, and finds much better realization in that counterculture staple, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" than it does here. ("Beauty"'s subplot deals with the relationship between a next-door neighbor boy, who, we learn, has recently been released from a mental ward.) And let's not even talk about the Freudian cliche of the homophobic military mentality, and its inexorable, violent desublimation.
Even on smaller levels of detail, "American Beauty" says very little that hasn't been said before. The dead narrator device was done first, again, by Billy Wilder, this time in "Sunset Boulevard." Visually, director Sam Mendes likes to film the family scenes as statically as possible, typically relying on symmetrical compositions and austere interior shots to get across the sterility of Lester Burnham's existence. We've been here before. too--in "Ordinary People." (Mary Tyler Moore did Carolyn Burnham better in that film, incidentally, than the competently done, but two-dimensional portrayal given her by Annette Benning in this one.) The level of plagiarism is so thoroughgoing in fact that when the sensitive artist character is shown videotaping a dead bird (because, he explains, it radiates divinity), those who know the history of photography will recognize it as an Edward Weston subject, circa 1954.
In other contexts these kinds of second-hand themes and imagery might be inoffensive, even hip in an allusive, post-modern way. But the one thing that "American Beauty" insists upon is the importance of purity of individual artistic vision, as exemplified in the person of Ricky Fitts, the sensitive boy-next-door artist figure, who obsessively videotapes the things that appeal to him. Why, then, does the film rely so shamelessly on the ideas and images of others?
Perhaps the answer is that, when the film does reach for originality, it utterly fails to convince. Partly this is due to a failure of nerve. Unlike the anti-bourgeois, bohemian critiques of the 50s and 60s, whose contempt for middle-class values was unsullied by self-interest, "American Beauty" needs those very middle-class filmgoers, desperately. Otherwise, how is the studio going to make back the production costs? Thus, the film shifts the locus of the cultural rot from the ticket-buying, middle-class many, to the well-hated few: the SUV-driving yuppie. Everyone hates yuppies--especially the securely rich, such as Hollywood filmmakers. That's because no one really IS a yuppie--at least, in their own minds. So the film safely critiques a world that no one is likely to recognize that they belong to.
Yet, strangely, the yuppie class signals are still all wrong. We learn in passing that Lester Burnham makes a very unyuppie salary of $60K a year, at virtually the same desk job that Jack Lemmon had in "The Apartment"; and his wife is an unsuccessful real estate agent. How they support the trappings of an upper-middle class lifestyle is never explained.
The critique of yuppie materialism is also meretricious. When Lester rails at his wife for fetishizing their Italian sofa--screaming, "It's just a thing, Carolyn! It's...just...a...thing"--one wishes that Carolyn had gone outside to Lester's freshly purchased vintage convertible and keyed the finish, just to put his newfound "antimaterial values" to the test. But that would complicate things unduly.
That the film's anti-yuppie pose is just that, is belied by its passing depiction of the neighborhood's openly gay couple. Alone among the film's characters they are depicted unironically as well-adjusted and outgoing--yet they inhabit the same sterile yuppie world as the Burnhams and the Fitts. How is that? One of two conclusions presents itself: either the film is equating the sterility of yuppie life with the sexual sterility of homosexuality (hardly likely, given the film's heavyhanded critique of homophobia), or the film is pulling its punches when it comes to the film's one PC minority. Neither reflects very flatteringly on the film.
The film also tries to extend the metaphor of artist as rebel individualist by making Ricky Fitts not just a dope smoker (a standard trope of any Tom Robbins novel), but a dope dealer, and a highly successful one at that. Show of hands: how many of us pro-inhaling Clinton voters have ever known a virtuous, artistic dope dealer? I didn't think so. Yet Ricky isn't the only one who's virtuous--he seems to have only stolid, trustworthy clients and suppliers as well. Maybe this neighborhood isn't so bad--or so typical--after all?
"American Beauty" is expertly acted, beautifully filmed, and tightly plotted, with little surprises in all the right places and expensive production values wall to wall. In other words, it's much like the empty yuppie landscape it critiques. And it made scads of money at the box office. That perhaps, is the most telling critique of all.