Without Spacey's dazzling performance, it would just be another pretentious and amateur glorified independent film

Rating: 7/10 (19 February 2008)

Almost eight years since first seeing it, I still cannot fathom why everyone was so smitten with American Beauty. There is practically nothing about it that seems relevant as to why it won a smouldering amount of critical acclaim then, and still has yet to show me why it will stand the test of time as the years go on. Instead, it still is just frighteningly average.
Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) is in a downward spiral. After years of living the good life, he has hit his midlife crisis. His wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening), is straying away from him and is stuck in her own rut of depression, and his daughter Jane (Thora Birch) just seems to loathe his very existence. But after a new family moves in next door, and Lester meets Jane's gorgeous best friend Angela (Mena Suvari), he begins to turn his life around.
The plot description really does no justice for what little good there is in the film, but it does say what is wrong with it. It is just plain uninteresting and far from blazingly original. Breaking the film right down to its plainest terms, makes it just another story about redemption. Spacey's Lester just wants to be redeemed for everything that has happened and brought him to this moment in his life, and spends the whole movie seeking that one true thing. It never bothers lingering on what was wrong in the first place, and it never makes us truly understand why he needs to make such a radical change in his life, and rip up the family unit even more so on his way doing it. Much of what Lester does is not darkly comedic, satiric or even dramatic. It comes off instead as awkward and disturbing. There is a fine line to walk between both, but this film cannot do it. Instead, it falls flat on its face right from the start, and barely ever recovers.
First time director Sam Mendes and screenwriter Alan Ball set out to craft the perfect take on dystopic suburbia, but really are only half baking the whole thing. What some may have taken to be perfection at its very core is strictly pretentious. There is a lot of attention given to the vivid colours in the film (used obviously to show certain emotions), but the film's underlying messages are far too mixed for any of them to actually matter. The long, straying shots only help add to the confusion that sets in rather rapidly, and its attempts at genuinely effecting moments do nothing for it. It struck me most often as an homage to ideas from the past and present, but nothing more than that. The work done here is amateur at best, and bites off more than it could ever chew. Some of the dialogue is indeed very clever, but the majority either comes off as useless or just a sheer attempt at being powerful. It only drags the movie out even further. And do not even get me started on that silly plastic bag.
But while the filmmakers and the film itself meanders a bit too often, Spacey is actually quite uncompromising in his performance. He has yet to do anything since (Se7en and The Usual Suspects notwithstanding) that even remotely compares to it (unless you count his wonderfully narcissistic and deliciously evil take on Lex Luthor in Superman Returns), and I doubt he ever will. Spacey paints Lester as a closeted basket case beautifully, and at times, rises well above the screenplay and the film's limitations. He has just the right amount of dry wit and dramatic tendencies to pull off such a brilliantly written character. His voiceovers, as ridiculously pretentious as they slowly become, are reassuring and at times, poetic. His zany performance is calculating and brilliant. Never once do we as the audience see an actor, we see a man whose life is slowly deteriorating all around him. The only problem is, he outshines everyone around him, and manages to completely spell out how Ball managed to completely sidestep writing anyone else nearly as good (or just left them to the audience's own enigmatic devices). All of the other actors do as best as they can to overcome this hindering, but Spacey's presence is felt throughout, and all of the actors show it in their performances whether he is on-screen or not. They may as well have been mimes.
I digress however. The film is nice on the eyes, especially when not in the dark or through the lens of a worthless videocamera disguised as a unique plot device. The score is also fairly well done. And the comeback story that takes place always makes for a rather enchanting picture (albeit one that has been told far too many times).
But American Beauty's pretentious over and undertones drag it down into just being merely watchable, if only to witness Spacey chew up and spit out every last ounce of scenery and character moments. He never lets up once, and singlehandedly does the film some form of justice. There is nothing to look closer at. It is just another overpraised film that seemed relevant at the time, but has slowly began to die off since. I wish it was only Spacey's performance that won awards instead of the entire movie. It did not deserve any of its accolaids.
7/10.