What...What was the point?

Rating: 1/10 (5 March 2020)

AMERICAN BEAUTY is, to put it quite bluntly, an embarrassment. At least if you consider yourself an accomplished filmmaker. True, if the director were severely mentally challenged, this film would deserve all the praise in the world for its ironically glamorous style. But that would only prove how low a bar this movie set for itself, because plenty of movies out there are pretty to look at.
While I could have believed that Sam Mendes and his crew won some Academy Awards at some point in their career, I never in a million years would have believed that they could have won the award for THIS! I'd even go far enough to say that THE MATRIX deserved the 1999 Best Picture award more than this did - and THE MATRIX was little more than trendy trash.
Even when watching this as a relatively naïve teenager, I could sense how hollow and trite AMERICAN BEAUTY was at its core. Did we really need a two-hour domestic drama to tell us that "suburbanites are weird and they're harboring shameful secrets?" You can get the gist of that from watching most Tim Burton films - and be more entertained than here, too. Not to mention that the above cliché was already, well, a cliché as early as the Fifties.
And speaking of the Fifties, I can't help wondering if, had Mendes made AMERICAN BEAUTY four decades earlier, he would have won even more Oscars. Because here he rips off a LOT of films from that era, and not only are they very famous films but they're considered classics. Dead guy as a narrator? SUNSET BOULEVARD already did it (and DOUBLE INDEMNITY did it even earlier, albeit with an ALMOST dead guy). Secretly taking pictures of people? REAR WINDOW already did it. A middle-aged man cheating on his wife for a much younger woman? One of the oldest plots in history - but, more to the point, THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH already did it.
Which brings me to the biggest slap in the face of all. The young woman in question (who is not the "American Beauty" rose garden of the title, but is explicitly associated with it) is not Marilyn Monroe but Mena Suvari - a girl who would need only the smallest amount of makeup to portray a vampire. Sorry if that sounds mean, but it's true. Even when Suvari is doing her utmost to be sexy (and this film certainly makes the effort), her pale and cadaverous face is pretty hard to ignore. For that reason alone, this movie's plot makes no sense. It's not much of an exaggeration to say that in real life most men wouldn't consider it worth the risk to betray even a 100-year-old Annette Bening for Mena in her prime.
I must admit that I'm glad this movie exists, if only for the reason that I get to mock it and joke about it. And I can't help thinking that it works on SOME level. You might consider it a feature-length, VERY dark cheesy sitcom spoof. Or a very polished student film done as a warmup during the first semester. Or something to leave in a time capsule for our distant descendants or a visiting alien race who wanted to learn about twentieth-century American movie stereotypes.
But it does NOT work on the Oscar level.