American Pulchritude

Rating: 7/10 (10 June 2006)

Hadn't seen the film for three or four years until I watched it again last night. A thread in the discussion board wondering whether the film isn't over-rated got me responding and eventually I decided to post here instead.
It's difficult to see where American Beauty doesn't quite mesh, as it's blessed with brilliant performers like Cooper and Bening supporting a brave piece of work by Kevin Spacey, who puts his golden voice to work with autumnal beauty as well as truly inventive notes of sarcasm.
We've seen a lot of movies since this one using elements of magic realism, particularly the serendipity of gathering together unlikely plot and character threads,surprisingly triumphant again this year with Crash (2005), which to my mind didn't accomplish it half so well as Magnolia(2000) or the much earlier Altman opus, Short Cuts (1993). It's a difficult trick to manage without seeming contrived, and to me, here, it fails.
Partly it annoyed me because I felt some of the story arcs were merely limned into form, with me expected to fill in the rest of, well, the cliché. For example, imagine how dull an extensive treatment of Cooper's latent homosexuality and his son's repressive nature would be; no, we wouldn't wish Sam Mendes to have developed this further, the point being that we'd feel that way because we've seen it all before - here Mendes doesn't have anything to add to that facet of the narrative. Apply the same test to the father/daughter, husband/wife, Humbert/Lolita, midlife crisis angsts and we are left wondering what at all is fresh about the movie?
And while I'm complaining about sketchiness I find myself paradoxically lamenting the overt preachiness of the script, the achilles heel of virtually all American studio Serious Films, which are never satisfied when an idea is simply felt and understood, but must rather be stated like a polemic or with all the moral certitude of a lawyer's jury summation. Watch this film and then Capote (2005)for contrast - the motifs thread their way ever so lightly through the latter, subtly suggesting, challenging, provoking, drawing us further into the mysteries of complex natures rather than staking them out like the sectioned specimens of von Hagens Body Worlds exhibit. Is the comparison fair when American Beauty is on one level at least a satire? I think so, when Mendes' ultimate intent is to teach us something profound about our modern life.
A single case of the false notes that are struck, the telegraphing to the audience: Lester finds his nymphet, Angela, weeping in a corner, and comforts her with his restored virility and self-assurance. His conquest complete, he begins to undress her when she blurts out the inevitable, predictable fact of her virginity. Now, Lester has been shown to be an intelligent, re-invigorated and thus keenly observant man. Yet the fact that she lay beneath him visibly trembling and almost squirming with a look of terror in her eyes for upwards of thirty seconds seems to have escaped him completely. Why? For the simple cinematic necessity that the viewer discover it first, to render his shock, the crushing of his randy hopes and his quick restoration in himself of a fatherly humanity all the more compelling. This is all very nice, but it ain't truth.
I still like the film. You can't beat Spacey's poetic narration and his commitment to the role. There's Bening's face-smacking melt-down and heroically regained composure - and a tangible wistfulness pervading the whole, gorgeously, emblematically captured as Ricky and Jane watch his film of the grocery bag caught in a courtyard eddy.
It's memorable for its defining moments, and that's still saying a lot, and bests much of whatever else people are forced to watch in the narrow-casting of today's Cineplex.