Less than the sum of its parts

Rating: 6/10 (29 September 1999)

I'm afraid I have to be the dissenting voice on this picture. The nation seems to be falling all over itself to heap praise upon "American Beauty," and I found myself expecting a great film, and all I got was a good one -- it's a petty complaint, maybe, but I can't help but be disappointed after all the build-up.
After the movie, my date and I sat and talked about the picture and recounted dozens of little moments we enjoyed, laughed at, or which got us to think: Carolyn's brief moment of self-awareness after she warns Lester not to spill beer on the sofa; the off-hand joke about Jane no longer needing the "boob-job" money she'd been saving; Lester telling off his middle-management stiff before quitting his job, etc. But we agreed that these little things did not add up to the great movie everybody is saying this is.
The script tries to cover so much ground, tell so many little stories, that it loses its focus on the one, big story that a film needs to be. The film is rife with tiny but annoying lapses in plausibility: Lester using an open window as a mirror while he pumps iron in the nude; Jane and Ricky walking along a street amazingly devoid of cars (a photographic convenience) until a funeral motorcade comes along; and a series of very sitcom-my devices in a subplot involving a case of "mistaken homosexuality."
Worst of all, I never felt involved in these peoples' lives. Even the most outwardly superficial people have human qualities on some level, but Mendes' main objective seems to be to satirize his characters rather than show us their depths. He relies much too heavily on caricature, and overused caricature at that. As a result, we're kept at a distance from the very people we should be seeing up-close and in intimate detail. These lives feel designed for our instruction rather than actually lived, and "American Beauty" feels like a warning against some imagined suburban lifestyle rather than a drama about fully rendered human beings.