A Cinematic Sitcom

Rating: 8/10 (7 December 2000)

condemning suburbia), you'll find yourself enjoying "American Beauty" for its supreme silliness and smooth acting, especially by the awe-inspiring Kevin Spacey and Wes Bentley. Alan Ball wrote the script; he's a former sitcom writer and it shows: he's insistent on setting everything up for payoffs both comedic and pathetic and the misunderstandings and mistakes that comprise the second half of the story are completely unbelievable but quite entertaining in their lunacy-like a tragicomic episode of "Seinfeld". Sam Mendes is the director, a product of the theater making his feature debut. He's a Brit, so his angle to is to come in as an outsider but he doesn't seem to have any new takes on America; he depends too much on Ball. His technique is fairly mundane--he seems to be learning film as he goes, so it'll be a while before he's able to accomplish anything audacious. The performances are the meat of the project with Spacey delivering an endearing, funny turn as the everyman allowed to express himself the way every man would like. He lends everything a sense of credibility that the writing doesn't have. Annette Bening is his status-oriented spouse and she's the wacked-out personification of the script as well as the antithesis of Spacey's subtlety. Well worth seeing if you adjust your expectations a little lower.