The Image of Success

Rating: 10/10 (23 April 2005)

The Burnhams are a typical, upwardly mobile family: a father with a well-paid job in advertising, a mother who is a driven real estate sales agent, an angst-ridden teen age daughter who is at an age to despise her parents. They live in a lovely home with a white picket fence, lovely roses, and a red door. Everything about them projects an image of success. And yet-- Lester (Kevin Spacey) hates his advertising job, which makes him feel like a prostitute selling second rate wares to stupid johns. Caroline (Annette Benning) is frustrated at being second-best in the real estate business. Daughter Jane (Thorah Birch) finds both of her parents vapid and doubts her own validity as a person--particularly when compared with her beautiful, sexed-up best friend Angela (Mena Suvari.) Their lives, like the lives of so many others rushing "to get ahead in the world," have become less about actually living than about maintaining and improving upon the appearance of success so prized by society.
What is most astonishing about the film is its complete believability. Speaking as one who has worked a great deal in advertising and sales, I was amazed with the accuracy with which Ball's powerful and darkly funny script captured the lives of those whose values rest exclusively upon external achievement--Lester's growing and barely concealed hatred for advertising and Caroline's constant use of self-help tapes and personal success mantras are truly commonplace in the business world.
Now, if American BEAUTY were merely this and nothing more, it would still be an astonishing film. But it goes considerably further than that--for Lester, suddenly motived by a lust for his daughter's friend Angela, realizes how completely unenjoyable "keeping up appearances" has become. And he explodes the status quo in such a way as to bring every one's petty materialism and mask-like personaes into a sharp, very funny, and pitch-black focus as the shallow and meaningless things they are. And in the process he both finds and destroys himself forever.
The cast is astonishing throughout, with Kevin Spacey the ultimate "I Can't Take It Any More" man and wife Annette Benning the ultimate vision of every hard-core sales representative it has ever been my misfortune to meet, a woman determined to "project an image of success at all times" even if it kills her. Thora Birch is a remarkable young performer, as is her boyfriend Wes Bentley, and Mena Suvari is perfectly cast as the youthful beauty for whom Spacey develops an unexpected passion. Mendes' direction is flawless here, and he navigates the both the complicated appearances of success and the personal shallowness it conceals with tremendous clarity, never overplaying his hand in either direction.
Perhaps the most telling bits of the film are among the most subtle, as when the film posits the tiresomely yuppie but nonetheless considerably more honest gay couple next door as more genuine than the Burhams, Caroline's eternal efforts at ego building through motivational tapes, and the way in which Angela (in time honored teenage fashion) naively attempts to use sex as a weapon to conceal her own insecurities.
The film is extremely funny, but it is also ultimately devastating. A great many people--particularly those who equate "an image of success" with successful lives, will despise the film. But like it or not, American BEAUTY's take on the failure on the failure of the American dream is easily the most successful and deadly accurate satire on life in these United States since the equally wicked NETWORK. This is the real thing, people--and it may be too close to home for many. Watch it at your own risk. Strongly, strongly recommended.
Gary F. Taylor, aka GFT, Amazon Reviewer