A masterpiece of longings, deep-seated emotional complexes and lost innocence

Rating: 10/10 (15 June 2002)

A masterpiece of longings, deep-seated emotional complexes and lost innocence, American Beauty is one of the finest films I've seen in a long, long time. Annette Bening and Kevin Spacey give excellent, award-winning performances as Lester and Carolyn Burnham, a frustrated middle-aged couple living in suburbia. Their lives are mundane and they spend their time searching for redemption and happiness in their otherwise dismal lives. Their daughter Jane is a depressed teenager with a poor self-image and is described as a `regular teenager' in the screenplay. Thora Birch gives the finest acting of her brief career, displaying many complexities to a layered role.
The tragedy of Carolyn and Lester is that they can't find true happiness and they get emotionally attached to the wrong people. In the beginning of the film, Lester becomes obsessed with Jane's best friend Angela (Mena Suvari) and undergoes a physical transformation so as to appeal to her. By the end of the film he's accomplished his goal but before he has sex with her he sees her innocence and the guilt consumes him. He can't do it because he finally see's himself as a middle-aged man and her as little girl, reviving those lost feelings of paternalism. Lester has many aspects, but this is by far the most engaging facet of the character. He doesn't want to let go of his youth so he goes into denial about his life. When he lays his eyes on Angela for the first time he becomes a teenager again, and is insecure. At the same time his whole life has undergone a transformation because he's began to act like a teenager, without a care in the world. Fantasizing about lost temptations.
Kevin Spacey gives the finest performance in the role he was literally born to play (the role of Lester Burnham was supposedly written exclusively for Spacey.) While he has received critical acclaim for his work in Se7en and The Usual Suspects, Kevin Spacey proves that he lives up to the title of the decade's greatest performer. He exhibits a bizarre stillness, and says more in his facial expressions than any actor can in mere words.
Carolyn is completely withdrawn from Lester sexually and emotionally. Their relationship is a tapestry. After Carolyn has an affair with real estate agent Buddy Kane (Peter Gallagher) and is discovered by Lester, she has an emotional breakdown (which occurs several times in the film) and is convinced by a motivation tape that she should kill him. But of course when she discovers that he's dead, she symbolically falls forward into Lester's clothing, hysterically crying. She didn't know what she had until he was gone. She realizes that she really loved him and her desire to kill him was only a manifestation of her own self-loathing and guilt.
The tagline, `Look Closer,' may be an overstatement as the film's psychologically-charged sub-plot is far more interesting than the mere aspect of pushing the envelope and `breaking down walls.' Films like Happiness and The Ice Storm were successful in looking far closer than American Beauty has, but this film is a perfectly constructed masterpiece. Every shot pulsates with raw emotion. The lush colors and desolate landscapes supplied by veteran cinematographer Conrad L. Hall are exceptional. Hall won an Oscar for his brilliant use of light textures and emotionally draining photography, his second after his work on the all-time classic Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid.
Although this is his first film, Sam Mendes is a directional visionary. Each shot perfectly exhibits the feelings and emotion with a lot of emphasis on facial expressions and subtle movements. He perfectly choreographs every scene, texturing them with subliminal motifs. Mendes is big on stillness and is a master-blocker. The icing on the cake is the darkly sparse score. Like most great films, the music changes to adapt to the feeling of the sequence, and motifs are used to foreshadow events to come. Mendes' motifs are some of strangest the cinema has ever produced. The color red is used to predict tragedies about to occur (e.g. the roses from his fantasy sequences with Angela; Lester's dream car) and the illusion of prison bars (which were originally connected with the film's original ending, in which Jane's boyfriend, next-door neighbor Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley) is wrongfully imprisoned for the murder of Lester) are also ever present. The Fitts family supplies another interesting sub-plot. Ricky's father Frank (Chris Cooper) is a latently homosexual former colonel and Allison Janney delivers a brilliant performance as his shell-shocked plate-holding housewife.
What makes American Beauty a true enigma of modern film, is the complete and utter desolation of the setting. It's creepy without containing creepy people. The characters are normal people. The `Look Closer' element comes in when we realize how painful these peoples lives are. Where as Happiness and The Ice Storm paints a portrait of delinquents and pedophiles with no closure in life, American Beauty depicts the self-loathing skeletons in the closet, and their redemption. The normal, day-to-day soap opera of mundanity that is modern living.