Apparently the most widely over-appreciated film since 'The Piano'

Rating: 4/10 (23 February 2000)

Here in the UK there is a total consensus that American Beauty is everything you could ever wish for from a film. Utterly baffling, if you ask me. It's also being held up as an illustration of how Hollywood is tackling those anti-American Dream themes traditionally left to the more independent-minded film-makers. In fact it's a perfect demonstration of why Hollywood should keep it's nose out.
American Beauty has it's moments: the plastic bag blowing in the wind begins a nice evocation of the banal beauty that surrounds us, but the rest of the film is either superfluous or has been done much better many times before. It's not profound in any sense, it's certainly not witty, it's implausible, the direction is stagey, and it's characters are, at best, updated stereotypes (so the film's sensitive, sympathetic figures are the two weird kids who dress in black? What a surprise).
And as for that performance... Kevin Spacey looks like nothing more than a Big Hollywood Actor beamed into a low-key film to do his stuff. He twitches and grins and smirks and wisecracks like, erm, Kevin Spacey! They might as well have cast Al Pacino and let him loose to chew up the set. Annette Bening, however, is great. Small consolation.
If it's valid for commentators to herald American Beauty as the epitome of a nebulous 'Suburban/Middle Class Underbelly' genre, then it's equally valid for me to say forget AB, see 'Happiness' instead.