An older man's perspective on this incredible film

Rating: Null/10 (3 October 1999)

Writing as a 55-year old man who's had more than one mid-life crisis, I think I know a little about what Kevin Spacey was going through in the last year of his life. So many of the reviews I've read on-line and in the papers are from the point of view of younger people - people who haven't been knocked around by life very much yet. They cop an attitude and fail to see the essential truth of each of the characters in the story.

I've known a great many real estate brokers, for instance. Annette Bening's character is not over the edge. If anything, she's typical as hell. Just try selling a house that the former owners have left filthy and empty. It ain't easy, folks. Of course she has to pump herself up to do it. And when she endures rejection from a stream of losers who look like they probably couldn't afford the place anyhow, her tears are very, very real.
And what's the deal with the shock and outrage that I've seen expressed over Kevin Spacey's character's fantasies about his daughter's friend, the blonde cheerleader? Hey, that's the way men are wired up. A drop-dead gorgeous young girl summons up all sorts of emotions in an older man. Pedophilic emotions? (There, I said it.) Yes and no. On the one hand he'd love to be able to have sex with her. ("Making love" is not the sort of experience that she represents to him.) But on the other hand, and waaay more importantly, that kind of girl represents "lost youth" more dramatically than any number of theatrical metaphors could. And that's exactly what a mid-life crisis is all about, isn't it? Failing powers: physical, sexual, and - for Spacey and many of the men he represents - the loss of joy in life. She's just the trigger, the splash of cold water, that wakes him from his coma.
Even Spacey's attempts at rapproachment with his daughter ring true. Ask any father of a teenaged girl and you'll learn that their adolescence marked their withdrawal from their former closeness with their father. More than a withdrawal, there is that whole package of contempt, angst, and hostility for what the father (and often, mother) represent. Adolescent rebellion against familial control is a cliche that's true, even though it appears to be well-justified in this particular family. Had Spacey's character lived longer, he'd have learned that this passes to be replaced with a new kind of familial closeness as his daughter entered her 20's.
I've known men who in their 40's were ready to throw away their entire past lives for a last shot at youth. Some actually did it. Others entertained the notion, and an "entertaining" notion it is. And one died from it. Honest. It killed him. Twenty-five years ago I was working for a man who had just turned 40. He had a successful business, a 20-year marriage, two children, a house in the suburbs, and a beautiful, blonde secretary. She was sweet, understanding, a college grad with a degree in piano who could play wonderfully. But she was 25 and he was 40 and overweight. So he started swimming two miles a day at his club and eating a fat-free diet. They went to lunch together a lot. Eventually, he found excuses to stay in the city overnight - at his club, he told his wife - but really at the secretary's apartment. He bought a red convertible. He threw out his old Brooks Brothers suits and bought a stylish new wardrobe. He lost forty pounds and toned-up. He saw a psychiatrist twice a week to try to get to the root of the stress and rage and unhappiness he felt so often.

On the Thursday before the weekend on which he planned to tell his wife that he was leaving her, he was sitting in the sauna at his club. The guys in the sauna were complimenting him on how good he was looking and asking him how he did it. He told them that part of it was isometric exercises. To demonstrate how it worked he showed them how he could tense-up his body even when he was driving his car during the commute. And at that instant, when he was tensed, he toppled off the bench and - according to the coroner - was dead before he hit the ground with a massive coronary.

He died of a mid-life crisis. The stress of his impending confrontation with his wife was the proximal cause, sure as hell. Not that his wife or family ever knew this.
So I guess now you all might understand why "American Beauty" rang so many bells for me. The final coda was not "over the top" or "manipulative" as I've seen it referred to: it was Pure Revealed Truth. Ignore it at your own risk.