A Suburban Masterpiece

Rating: 10/10 (8 April 2004)

The opening and closing scenes of `American Beauty' are narrated from beyond the grave by the ghost of the recently deceased Lester Burnham. The rest of the film shows the story of the last few months of his life. On the face of things, he is living the American dream as a fully paid-up member of the middle class. He has a career in advertising, a large house in a well-to-do suburb, an attractive wife who has a successful career in her own right as an estate agent, and a pretty teenage daughter. Beneath the surface, however, Lester's life is falling apart. He is facing redundancy from his job, he is trapped in a loveless and sexless marriage and he feels alienated from his rebellious and difficult daughter.
Lester starts to question the values around which his life has been built and to behave in a seemingly eccentric manner. Deprived of both sex and affection by his increasingly self-absorbed wife Carolyn, he makes no secret of his sexual desires for Angela, his daughter's classmate and closest friend, and begins to work out in an attempt to make himself more attractive to her. He takes redundancy from his job after blackmailing his employers into giving him a generous settlement. In an attempt to recapture the happier days of his youth, he takes to smoking pot, buys an expensive sports car and gets a job in a fast-food joint. His relationship with Carolyn continues to deteriorate and she begins an affair with a rival in the real estate business.
Intertwined with Lester's story is that of his next-door neighbours, the Fittses, a family even more dysfunctional than the Burnhams. The father, Frank, a colonel in the Marines, is an authoritarian, bullying, control freak with a particular dislike of his own son, Ricky, whom he sees as insufficiently manly and suspects of homosexuality- wrongly, because Ricky is in fact dating Lester's daughter, Jane.
One of the film's major themes is the need to enjoy life to the full and the realisation that this can only be done through emotional honesty. Lester comes to realise that he has become too preoccupied with his career and with financial success to appreciate the beauty and joy of living. Most of the other characters, however, are guilty of bad faith in that their lives are based on pretence or the suppression of aspects of their personality. The most obvious case is that of Frank, whose violent prejudice against gays stems from his own repressed homosexual nature. Carolyn, a carefree, unconventional and loving young woman in the early days of her marriage, is now obsessed with her business, her successful image and the code of `keeping up appearances' to the exclusion of all else. As a result, she has become cold, neurotic and sarcastic, and the love she once felt for Lester has died. Angela, despite her fear of seeming ordinary, is precisely that; she has the rather conventional ambition, for an attractive teenager, of becoming a model. Her boasting about her supposed sexual conquests and her desire to seduce Lester when she discovers his attraction to her are born out of her need to see herself as glamorous and seductive. When she breaks down and confesses that she is really still a virgin, she suddenly seems a more sympathetic character; a vulnerable girl rather than a sluttish young woman. Even Ricky, whom Lester envies because of his ability to take pleasure in the beauty of life, is guilty of hypocrisy. He condemns the materialism and immorality of suburban life, but his own lifestyle is based on an equally materialistic and even more immoral pursuit of wealth through dealing in cannabis.
To criticise the film as one which encourages immoral behaviour is, in fact, to miss the point. It is not saying that it is necessary to attempt to commit adultery with a teenage schoolgirl or to deal in drugs in order to achieve happiness. Similarly, the film is not demanding that one should share Ricky's idea that a plastic bag blowing in the wind represents some sort of aesthetic ideal; it simply suggests that we should ourselves look for beauty, however we define it, in our daily lives. None of the characters (except, perhaps, Lester after his death) are presented as having all the right answers to life's problems, so they should not be seen as role-models to be imitated. Lester and Ricky, however, are at least asking the right questions, whereas Frank and Carolyn do not even realise that there are questions to be asked.
Because the major characters have two sides to their personalities, an outer and an inner side, the film demands high standards of acting. All the players rise to that challenge. Kevin Spacey well deserved his Best Actor award for his portrayal of the middle-aged rebel Lester. Annette Bening played Carolyn as selfish and neurotic, but also showed occasional glimpses of the vivacity that attracted Lester to her in the first place. Chris Cooper is excellent as the brutal yet tormented Frank, as are Thora Birch as Jane, truculent and rebellious yet in need of affection, and Mena Suvari as Angela. The criticism has been made that some of the characters (particularly Carolyn and Frank) are exaggerated rather than entirely lifelike, but this is deliberate exaggeration for satirical effect.
The film has certain similarities in subject-matter with that excellent British television satire from the seventies, `The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin', which also dealt with a frustrated middle-class suburbanite facing a mid-life crisis. (I wonder if Sam Mendes was influenced by youthful memories of this programme). `American Beauty', however, is a complex film with many levels of meaning; more than just a social satire on the mores of suburbia, it is also a character study and a philosophical exploration of the search for happiness and the meaning of beauty. There are some memorable visual images, such as the vision of Angela in the bath of rose petals and even the notorious plastic bag. Sam Mendes joins that illustrious group of directors, such as Orson Welles with `Citizen Kane' and Sidney Lumet with `Twelve Angry Men', who have made a masterpiece with their first feature film. 10/10.